[GRASS5] A naive opinion on how grass *should* work

[Russell Nelson]

Helena Mitasova writes:
 > set up a region at the beginning is a surprisingly big obstacle.
 > (well not so surprisingly, given the oldish interface for doing that)

No, it's not the interface.  Well, okay, it *is* the interface, but
more than that it's the necessary to know MORE than I really know.
Here's the questions I asked myself:

``1??  They're giving me a default lat/lon of 0N, 0E through 1N, 1E??
That's in the middle of the fricking ocean!!  That doesn't make any
sense.''

``Cell resolution?  What's a cell?  How do I know what my cell
resolution is?  I haven't even imported my first map, and it wants to
know what the resolution of the map is going to be?  I have no
fricking idea.''

``Hrm.  It doesn't accept "75.00W".  Maybe "75 00'W".  No, that's not
right either.  How about "-75.00"?  No, that doesn't work either.  How 
about "75.0000W"?  How about "7500W"?  ARRGGGGGHHHHHH!''

``Ahhhh, okay, it just wants integer degrees.  But how big should I
make my region?  Just the one map I want to do first, or should I make 
it big enough to hold all fifty maps??''

 > I guess that the problem to getting this addressed is that most of the
 > issues mentioned below are not such big issues once you use GRAS a lot
 > and especially with the improvements in r.in.gdal. (Russ use r.in.gdal
 > instead of r.in.tiff).

It didn't get built on my machine because libgdal was missing.

 > For example the issue of adapting the region
 > to displayed map (as Carl has mentioned before) would drive you crazy
 > if you are doing some modeling using a larger number of maps with
 > different extent and resolutions and you need to preview those maps,

Wait a second.  You mean that the region is only used for viewing??
Then why do I have to set it before doing anything in grass??

See how little I know?

 > >when I go into a location, grass should change my
 > >current directory to be that of the location.
 > 
 > By no means you would want to do that - you don't want to touch the
 > stuff in that directory if you are newbie.

You're right, I don't want to look in the subdirectories.  But it
would be nice if filename completion worked.  That way I could use
a-very-long-name-for-this-particular-dataset, and only have to type
a-v<TAB>.  So since I don't want to look in the subdirectories, I
should have an empty file with the same name as the raster file.

-- 
-russ nelson              http://russnelson.com | Okay, enough is enough!
Crynwr sells support for free software  | PGPok | Can we PLEASE all stop
521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | using insecure Microsoft
Potsdam, NY 13676-3213  | +1 315 268 9201 FAX   | email products???