[GRASS5] The status of 5.0

[rgrmill at rt66.com]

Helena wrote:

> all of the enhancements that you have mentioned are extremely useful - 
do
> you have
> at least a brief man pages for the new ones? (especially the MODFLOW
> related?)

No man pages yet.  In fact, some need a little more tweaking before they 
are generally useful.  I wrote these in a spasm of productivity last 
fall and they allowed me to turn a large project around so fast that it 
made my collaborator's head spin.  My whining may make it seem like I'm 
unhappy with GRASS 5, but I'm not.  GRASS is a *very* big hammer.

I realized this morning while looking into the problems with r.out.ascii 
that I also inserted a -M option in r.out.ascii to write MODFLOW ascii 
arrays.

> Markus, would it be possible to include these new and enhanced 
modules?
> 
> Now the question is where they should go? GRASS5.1? Are they ready for 
the
> current GRASS5.0?

With documentation they would be ready for 5.0, but if we want to make a 
stable 5.0 release in the near future then it probably isn't a good time 
to be adding new modules.

> As for the "big GRASS 4 installations" are there any? All those that I 
have
> known here in the US
> had to switch to ESRI products years ago (CERL, NRCS, USGS, etc.),
> as it was manadated as a standard for government agencies.

Probably a dark day for GIS development.  What ever happened to MOSS?

The only large GRASS 4 installation I know of is at Blacklands.  I think 
the full name is the Blacklands Agricultural Research Station, Texas A&M 
University.  It's in Temple, Texas.  They used (are using?) GRASS and 
SWAT for watershed simulation of major parts of Texas to assess the 
possible water-supply impact from brush control projects.  I came across 
them when we needed to review their model of the Canadian River basin.  
They sent us several hundred megabytes of GRASS4 and SWAT files.

I've always assumed that Baylor has a functional GRASS4 installation.

I recall from a conversation on this list more than a year ago that 
there might be some installations in France and possibly others 
elsewhere in Europe.

This is on a barely-related tangent.  A friend of mine once expressed an 
interest in using GRASS in his research into the Martian 
paleoenvironment.  I thought that was an interesting application.


Roger Miller