[GRASS5] documentation

[Helena]

> start a general review of everything that is available, merge usable stuff and
> write whatever is needed.

It would be absolutely wonderful if you could review what is there - some time
ago
I suggested to Markus that just giving each document a rating (maybe *, **, ***)
in terms of how much up-to-date and usable it is would help a lot and then sort
them by this rating.
This of course means reading everything and testing those materials that are
considered
up-to-date in terms of GRASS5. And of course the rating may need updates from
time to time.
So it is quite a bit of work but it would be really useful.
As far as I know the best, most comprehensive and up-to date material about GRASS
is the users manual,
most of the rest is not really being updated.

> BTW, Markus+Helena, can we publish the english translation of the manual ? Even
> if it needs polishing it might be better than what we have now, and publishing
> it might attract people to work on it.

The problem with the old german book is that it is old and it may cause quite a
bit of confusion rather than help.
It reads well but just take it and start doing things as described there.
For example, important (and for users often confusing) issues related to NULL
data and floating point
are there described only briefly as specialties of GRASS5, while in fact they are
now major features that
almost everybody has to deal with. Or try to process and analyze your site data -
that has changed a lot too.
We have found that we had to essentially rewrite most of the book to make it
usable for GRASS5.0  and at the same time systematically test big part of GRASS
which was a huge effort, and it is still not as complete as it should be.

So I really believe that instead of trying to fix the old book (which would be a
monumental work, as it requires much more than polishing),  it would be actually
faster and better to write new on-line tutorial based on the latest GRASS5
release, rather than rely on GRASS4* materials. We have already set it up, I
think that Markus has a link to it.

I think that it should be more task oriented rather than  "type of data" oriented
as is the users manual. For example it should have:
Setting-up a project, Importing Data, Integrating data from different coordinate
systems, Digitizing, Viewing maps, Working with surfaces, Computi ng the basic
statistics, etc. For some tasks we already have nice tutorials,  e.g. map algebra
or nviz, so those could be updated and used directly.
Also it should be structured for on-line learning, more graphics, and interaction
than the book's plain text. (for example for our on-line erosion modeling
tutorial we have the commands linked with manual pages and maps, so you can learn
everything about the command that you are using by clicking on it and also see
how your inputs and outputs may look like:
see http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/gmslab/erosion/usped.html
or the later version of the whole thing at
http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/gmslab/reports/CerlErosionTutorial/denix/denixstart.html)

This format (Markus set it up with php instead of frames) would be also more
suitable for getting more people to work on it.
And translations should be much easier as a lot of the text could be "bulletized"
rather than writing complex sentences which are more difficult to translate.

So that is just a suggestion

Helena