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

[Russell Nelson]

Glynn Clements writes:
 > Even more significantly, it's also used when reading existing raster
 > maps. With a few exceptions, input maps are resampled according to the
 > current region settings.

Didn't people just tell me that I could change it any time I wanted?
How can I do that if my input maps got resampled?

Okay, so in order to learn anything, I have to know everything??  This
is NOT good.  GRASS should allow me to import a raster map, and should
set the region to match it, if it's the first map loaded.  If I import
another map, and it's going to be clipped (I don't know -- is it??),
or resampled (apparently), then the r.in.* program should say so.

GRASS should *always* do the right thing by default, and say what it
did.  If a user asks it to do something that doesn't make sense, GRASS 
should do it anyway, and print a warning.

 > But *most* programs need a region. The region concept is so pervasive
 > that it just isn't worth complicating the majority of programs to
 > allow for the possibility of there not being a current region. 

You could be quite right.  Please respect my newbie experience telling
you that region-setting is difficult and confusing.  The defaults are
not reasonable and have no relationship to the data I'm trying to
import or view.

 > Especially when all that it would achieve would be to allow newbies to
 > defer learning about the region for a minute or two.

Even if all they can do is run grass and type "help", that is a
valuable addition.  I think you've forgotten how frustrating it is not
even to be able to start up a program without needing to be an expert!
I appreciate your expertise, and thank you for responding to my
concerns.  But understand that my ignorance is valuable, too (while it
lasts :).

 > It might be worth making it easier to automatically create a suitable
 > location when importing a raster. But the main problem there is that
 > the data being imported is frequently uncorrelated, so the projection
 > and the coordinates *must* be specified by the user.

Unless it's already georeferenced.  I thought that was the whole point 
of GeoTIFF -- to carry the projection and coordinates around with the
raster data itself.

-- 
-russ nelson              http://russnelson.com | Okay, enough is enough!
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