[GRASS5] Proposed process for GRASS reorganization (please read)

Roger S. Miller rgrmill at rt66.com
Fri Mar 23 12:27:41 EST 2001


Strobe and GRASS developers,

I've read the proposal.  Three or four times now.

First and most generally, the current effort in GRASS 5.0 appears focused
on getting the existing capabilities working correctly on a fairly
complete list of platforms.  A lot of the source code is 10 years old or
older and it's quite an effort.  This is a user-oriented effort aimed at
completing previously stated goals and getting the capabilities working
completely and for more users.

The proposal to reorganize GRASS under a completely different "paradigm"
might be suitable for a later major revision of GRASS, but does not (to me
at least) appear appropriate to Grass 5.  Whether or not that
reorganization is a good goal for later revisions lies I think in Bruce
Byars' hands.

Less generally, I'm not very keen on generalized models or on OOP.

OOP is a reasonable way to organize a large programming effort in a
corporate or academic environment with a top-down organization.  Currently
GRASS development seems to be based more on consensus-building, which I
think is typical and possibly necessary in volunteer efforts.  So I'm not
so sure that OOP is good for our setting.

Maximum operational efficiency comes from code that is organized to
complete a specific task.  Where I've seen code developed on generalized
schemes the results have been much less efficient.

Certainly if the developers were to consider such a sweeping change in
the structure of GRASS they would need to review some more specific
suggestions about how the current code would be merged into the new
structure.

Finally and most specifically, your discussion omitted the GRASS "sites"
map type.  You used the term "site" for other purposes in describing the
program structure, so your proposal at the very least needs to be reworded
to account for the third map type.


Roger Miller
Lee Wilson and Associates



---------------------------------------- 
If you want to unsubscribe from GRASS Development Team mailing list write to:
minordomo at geog.uni-hannover.de with
subject 'unsubscribe grass5'



More information about the grass-dev mailing list