[GRASS-dev] grass is a monad?

[Paul Kelly]

On Thu, 14 Jan 2010, Paolo Cavallini wrote:

> Hi all.
> Reading the recent post of Glynn:
>
> Right now, I'm actively trying to think of ways to make life harder for anyone trying
> to use the GRASS libraries for anything except GRASS modules.
> http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/869#comment:1
>
> I wonder if this is somehow a view shared by GRASS-PSC, and I ask myself what would
> be the advantage of having GRASS as an isolate piece of software.
> I would greatly appreciate devs opinions on this.

Well, Glynn's comment is clearly (as I see it anyway!) meant to be 
light-hearted/sarcastic. But it has some basis. The idea is not that GRASS 
should not be used be other projects, but we encourage other projects to 
use it by running GRASS modules - not by linking against the GRASS 
internal libraries directly. In the past few years a massive amount of 
work has gone into making the GRASS modules more Unix-like (do one thing 
simply and do it well, with no interactivity) - and while this annoyed me 
a bit for a while, I think it has opened up so many more opportunities for 
use of GRASS modules as a backend to other systems (e.g. the GRASS GUI) 
that it is a very good thing.

So, I feel the idea behind Glynn's comments (and one that I guess I would 
agree with) is that we encourage other projects to use GRASS by calling 
the modules directly. As GRASS has so few developers compared to the 
massive body of code, putting in extra development time to make GRASS work 
in ways that have no benefit for GRASS is just too much effort.

Best regards

Paul