[GRASS-dev] what's going on in r39326

[Maris Nartiss]

Hello everyone.
I was not expecting so much communication for such little change. I
must blame my language sk33lz as I'm not able to explain what it does
;)

First - Markus - only way how to really check wheither batch jobs are
broken is to test that. Theoretically if You have set GRASS_BATCH_JOB
env variable You should be just fine.

Second - what was broken, still is broken. GRASS still fails to launch
with tcsh and other sh/bash incompatible shells (grep export
lib/init/* |  wc -l).

Third - Benjamin - "Code that was hard to write should be hard to
read" ;) There has never been a way how to start GRASS by its launch
script without terminal. BATCH_JOB thing is a just hack-in to get
around init.sh legacy design. I seriously doubt that Windows users are
using sh to launch GRASS (especially /bin/sh), still, if they do, they
need a terminal. Normaly this change should affect only careless Linux
users.
This change is commited to 6.5 and probably after testing should go to
6.4. In GRASS 7 we can do what we want.
I have old patches lying around in GForge that where providing GUI
cleanup on shell exit and gis.m option to terminate GRASS session. I
will try to get tem into 6.5 asap.

Those, who don't get reason of this change, please, perform following
steps in GRASS 6.4:
1) Start file browser;
2) Navigate to grass64 executable file (/usr/bin/grass64);
3) Launch it;
4) Start GRASS (this will fail if default GUI is text);
5) Close GUI;
6) ps fax | grep -C 3 sh
Steps 1, 2 and 3 can be replaced with ALT+F2 grass64 <ENTER>
Notice - in step 6 You will see Init.sh process that avaits user
input, still it's stdin and stdout are not connected to any terminal.
Now it's impossible to cleanly terminate GRASS - only kill and then
manually clean up.

I hope now I have adressed everyones concerns. If something doesn't
work as it should because of this commit, then report it as a bug :)

Maris.


2009/9/29, Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org>:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 9:04 PM, Maris Nartiss <maris.gis at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This patch just launches somekind of interactive terminal/konsole
>> if there isn't one. It should not affect anyone who is launching GRASS
>> in "normal" way - from terminal/console or by shortcut that starts
>> some console.
>
> Well, but how about the batch mode? I cannot dig into your code right
> now to understand if that's broken now... I am using scripts to launch
> GRASS batch jobs. That continues to work? I hope so :)
>
> Markus
>