[GRASS5] status of libgrass, mapserver, gdal and >8bit rasters

[Markus Neteler]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 02:32:54PM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Stephan Holl wrote:
> >Dear developers,
> >
> >after some testing using the (quite outdated) libgrass-version with
[...]
> 
> Then there is the more general question of whether I will be updating 
> libgrass
> to catch up to more modern GRASS versions. I am not actually aware of any
> changes in GRASS raster support that would need an update of libgrass, but 
> it
> is my hope to modernize it at some point.  Quite possibly in the near future
> everything provided by libgrass will be provided in the core GRASS shared
> libraries (libgis, etc) in a way suitable to replace the seperate libgrass.

Frank,

a quick look into libgrass showed that a few (!) functions have
been added to libgrass with respect to the original libgis, libdatetime etc.

grep G_ gdal/frmts/grass/grassdataset.cpp | cut -d'G' -f2 | cut -d'(' -f1 |\
   sed 's+^+G+g' |grep G_ | sort -u
x       G_check_cell            - opencell2.c
        G_close_cell
        G_free
        G_free_colors
x       G_get_cell_as_proj4     - get_proj4_def.c
        G_get_cellhd
        G_get_color
        G_get_fp_range_min_max
        G_get_null_value_row
        G_get_raster_row
x       G_gisinit_2             - gisinit2.c
        G_open_cell_old
        G_read_colors
        G_read_fp_range
        G_set_error_routine
        G_set_window
---------------
x: 3 new functions in libgrass

Maybe 2-4 underlying functions were also implemented.

suggestion:

Maybe move these few extra functions to
 gdal/frmts/grass/
or 'libgis' and simply link GDAL against the shared libraries
of GRASS 5.3/5.7?

This would probably simplify everybodies life as
- you (someone else) don't have to maintain libgrass any more
- always latest libgis etc are used as taken from GRASS directly
- user need only GDAL and GRASS (the latter should be mostly
  present as the user somehow has to create the GRASS DB when linking
  MapServer to it)

I also think that we should release the GRASS libraries as stand-alone
package in future (probably with GRASS++ libs, let's jump into the license
discussion again...) to add more flexibility in GRASS packaging.

Markus