summaries of contributed programs

[Simon Cox]

We are a new GRASS site, with some plans for developing some new analysis 
tools.  Past experience in programming has shown that quickest results are 
often gained by modifying a piece of exisiting code, rather than starting 
from scratch, so I wanted to hunt around for likely stuff in the existing 
distribution.  Our site has not downloaded much of the code in "related" 
or "contributed", so the manual pages for these are not easily available 
to see if anything suits.  As far as I can see, the only way to find out 
what is out there is to go through the process of downloading and unpacking.  
Since 95% of the time the program will not be useful to us, this seems to be 
wasteful.  

Is there a compilation of summaries of contributed programs anywhere that 
can be grabbed *without* downloading all of the archives?  

Wouldn't it make sense for manual pages for all contributed programs to be 
stored in a separate archive so that they can be accessed independently?  

Is this functionality already available somehow?  

What do the people at the moon think about this?  

Our particular interest in using it for geological problems.  I had very 
little response to a previous posting enquiring about geological analysis 
programs to use with GRASS, so am now planning to do some development work 
myself.  

Thanks all.


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Dr Simon Cox			|
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Department of Earth Sciences	|
Monash University		|
Clayton  Vic  3168		| 
Australia			|
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Phone (03) 565 5762		|
Fax   (03) 565 5062		|
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