[GRASS5] g.list

[Michael Tiemann]

On Tue, 2004-10-19 at 15:40, Markus Neteler wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2004 at 10:52:19AM -0500, Kirk R. Wythers wrote:
> > I am getting an Bus error with 57 when I try and run g.list. Is anyone 
> > else experiencing this issue?
> 
> I have added two days ago support for ascii vector listing
> (just by extending the element list). Should that be an issue?
> Works fine on RH9 and MDK10
> 
> Markus
> 

Thanks for using Red Hat as one of your reference platforms (and of
course many thanks for all your great leadership and support of the
GRASS project!).  May I suggest using something other than RH9 as your
reference for sanity-checking?  RH9 is no longer supported by Red Hat,
and moreover it does not feed forward into anything that will be
supported by Red Hat.  Some ideas are:

(A) Use a currently shipping version of a supported Red Hat platform
such as Enterprise Linux 3 (aka RHEL3).  This version was released Oct
2003 and will be supported until Oct 2010.  Future versions of RHEL will
provide compatibility libraries so that RHEL3 apps /should/ work on
RHEL4 (currently in beta) and future versions.  Think of this as "Port
Once, Run Forever".  I have just finished establishing a program within
Red Hat (not yet formally announced, but if you want more info, contact
me off list) whereby qualifying non-profit organizations may download
and run Enterprise Linux software (any version) from a 3rd party for a
small administrative fee (that covers the cost of verifying your 501(c)3
status).  And of course Red Hat has an ISV program for commercial ISVs,
an academic program for research, etc.

(B) Use a version of Fedora Core.  Fedora Core is freely downloadable
and is 100% Free/Open Source software.  (Enterprise Linux does include,
off to the side, non-free software, such as various proprietary JVMs,
etc., which are necessary for the vast majority of today's commercial
customers.)  Fedora Core is not commercially supported by Red Hat but it
is robust (meaning that a large community of users agreed the quality of
the product was a credit to their effort), it is leading edge (meaning
that your work, by association and involvement, will be part of that
leading edge), and, perhaps most importantly, it is the upstream release
for our (and who knows? other) commercial Linux distributions.  This
means that if you get things working in Fedora Core, it's more likely
that your work will be that much closer to qualifying for commercial
adoption.  (That's not to say that that should be the only goal of
GRASS, but I think all can agree that as one of many goals, it's a good
one to also achieve.)

(C) Use both ;-)

RH9, while still popular in the world, is declining, much as the NCSA
webserver declined once Apache started to take off.  We see Fedora Core
becoming increasingly popular as a platform for free software,
particularly free software that cares to qualify for commercial use as
well.  I make these suggestions not as a sales pitch for Red Hat, but
because I believe that GRASS is great both as completely free software
that can be patched and updated from CVSHEAD as well as software that
can run consistently, over a period of years, in commercial production
environments.  And by picking the right platform for sanity testing and
qualifications, both goals can be more easily achieved and more
forcefully demonstrated.

M

P.S.  To put my money where my mouth is, I funded intevation.de (who did
a great job, btw) to package GRASS for FC2.  I continue to work with
them and others for the forth-coming FC3.