[GRASS5] The status of 5.0

[Eric G. Miller]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 09:16:34AM -0700, rgrmill at rt66.com wrote:
> 
> Glynn wrote:
> 
> > Note that the monitor sockets no longer live in <mapset>/.tmp/..., 
> but
> > in /tmp/grass-<user>.
> 
> That change was made in 5.0 since pre2?
> 
> That seems like a good change, but not necessarily better then saving 
> under a user's ".grass" directory, which was the original option.  
> Hopefully this was done in such a way that it won't cause me major 
> update problems.  Clearly while this change might be benign it should 
> serve as an example of how changes in GRASS could make it very difficult 
> to upgrade a production GRASS installation.
> 
> Further, this is a pretty fundamental change.  This along with some 
> relatively recent changes in the monitor procedures just reinforce my 
> impression that GRASS5.0 is *not* yet stable.

It was really needed to keep the file path below the 104 character limit
for socket file paths.  Some people were hitting it.  I'd hardly
characterize it as a "fundamental" change, since most everything
couldn't care less where the file really lives.  Now, the change from
LZW to ZLIB for floating point raster *was* a fundamental change.  The
work Radim has been doing for GRASS 5.1 vector are fundamental.  This,
however, is a small implementation detail.  There was some question if
the socket file could be reliably placed under $HOME, due to remote
mounts and such... Using /tmp is a pretty safe bet to be a local
mount.

-- 
Eric G. Miller <egm2 at jps.net>