[GRASS5] Proposal for a GRASS daemon to deliver metadata

[Markus Neteler]

Hi Justin  (hi all),

we have been talking about the GRASS environmental variables,
if and how to include a GRASS_TEMP variable etc. From
sitting here with Roger Bivand at Chatham campus, we got the
idea that a GRASS daemon might be great to solve a couple
of problems.

Roger needs the GRASS metadata (location parameters) to be know
for his R-statistics interface. Currently this is done by reading
the environmental variables, but this is not very elegant and
efficient. To have a daemon serving these data would be quite
good even for other applications coupled to GRASS.
And the (hopefully forthcoming) new XDRIVER with sockets may
make use of it, too.
Maybe (you will know that better than me) it is a way to make
possible location changes on-the-fly.

What we would have to do is to reserve a port number (I hope there
is one free), have the daemon of course and modify the
G_environment. Probably it could be useful too in order to set
up parallel GRASS sessions without locking. And maybe they could
talk to each other and share the workload on different CPU's? A
simple "parallel GRASS"?

I would be glad to receive comments on this and if you consider
this is feasible.

Greetings from U.K.

 Markus

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