[GRASS5] vector cats files

[Roger Miller]

Folks,

I don't know if my problem here is with the documentation, the gis library or 
with my application.

I have been modifying m.in.e00 to read some larger coverages.  The relatively 
small example I'm working with contains almost 25,000 polygons and the 
database in the exported coverage describes 183 attributes for each polygon.

Without modification m.in.e00 runs for 4 hours before it consumes all the 
available memory (ram and swap) and crashes.   I've modified the code so that 
it now reads and writes one attribute at a time, and allows the user to 
select one or more attributes to save.  That saves a lot of time and memory.
 
I also tried to reduce the size of the output cats files by using the GRASS5 
cats file format in which each line can describe a range of category numbers. 
The program runs, produces a good-looking cats file and a complete vector 
file.  The vector file displays correctly using d.vect, but any module that 
accesses the cats file seems to either seg fault (d.what.vect) or ignore the 
categories (v.digit).

If use the old format with no ranges then everthing works fine, but I have a 
category file that is considerably bigger than I need.

Has the GRASS5 vector library not been updated to use the GRASS5 cats file 
format?  If it has been updated, then could their be a bug in the library 
that shows up on large files?  Or do I need to look elsewhere for the problem?

A couple further questions.  

m.in.e00 produces  one cats file for each attribute that it imports.  The 
user is supposed to activate a file by copying one of the cats files over to 
a file with the default name for the map, then running v.support.  If I 
perform that step (which takes about 10 minutes) then change to a new cats 
file and repeat the step I get a very long dump of duplicate labels.  Is 
there some way to avoid that?  The only way I've found so far is to delete 
and reimport the vector file.  The step of running v.support on a second set 
of cats seems unnecessary to me.  Is there some way to avoid doing that?

Roger Miller