[Gdal-dev] gdal and libgrass

[Markus Neteler]

On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 01:37:14PM +0200, Silke Reimer wrote:
> Hallo!
> 
> As the debian maintainer of gdal I have been asked to add grass
> support to the gdal library [1]. Since I didn't work with this
> combination so far I investigated the situation in the archives and
> gatherd the following:
> 
> 1. gdal needs libgrass to connect directly to the grass raster format
> 2. libgrass is not yet included into the debian grass package (see [1])

There is another option: Radim Blazek wrote a new GDAL/GRASS driver
(see QGIS project for details). Frank considers to replace the old driver.
The new driver uses the GRASS libs directly, so the external 'libgrass'
is no longer needed then.

> Hence by now it will not be possible to include grass support to
> the gdal package since not all requirements are fulfilled.
> 
> The solution could be to ask the grass maintainer to add libgrass to
> his package but I am not sure whether this is useful at this stage.

IMHO not recommended.

> As far as I understood grass support is very much better with grass
> 5.7 then with grass 5.0 so it seems that I should wait until grass
> 5.7 is in debian.

As far as I understood the Debian grass maintainers, there will be
no GRASS 5.7 included into Debian in the near (far?) future.

> So I tend not to include grass support by now and wait until
> libgrass and probably grass 5.7 are included into debian. Does this
> make sense in your opinion

Let me vote for the GDAL/GRASS driver replacement, which might be 
faster than waiting that GRASS 5.7 reaches Debian one day. Debian
is still at GRASS 5.0(!).3 (there is also 5.3.0) but this doesn't
belong here.

Just my 0.02 Euro

 Markus