[GRASSLIST:506] Re: Shipping data with GNU/Linux distributions

[H Bowman]

> > > how feasible is it to have a default location? 
[...]
> > > Would you suggest shipping the spearfish data? 
[...] 
> Yes, but what is the use of spearfish?  Not much.  OK for practice,
> but nothing else.


That's the whole point isn't it? As many/most of the tutorials use
Spearfish, it's exactly what is asked for. To cover data imports, maybe
a WGS84 version of one of the site lists could be included in a
x,y,label formatted ascii text file. If the import tutorial is run
successfully, the resultant sites would line up perfectly with one of
the existing UTM site files. This doesn't cover v.in.* or r.in.* but
sorting out the re-projection process is the tough part & translates to
vectors and rasters.
-Are there too many GDAL supported formats for a tutorial covering the
use of one format to be useful?
-Is shape file import trivial enough these days that a demo for that is
unneeded?

As far as a demo global datasets go, my list would include coastline,
lakes, rivers, roads, and political boundaries. Soil/veg types may be
too huge to use? If this could be kept smaller than ~5mb compressed, all
the better, and that shouldn't be too hard if it is only vectors. 


my 2c,
Hamish