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

[Helena Mitasova]

> If you think I'm nutso, I was just talking to someone from the NPS who
> makes cave drainage maps.  I asked if he used GRASS.  He said "We used
> to, but now we use ARCInfo".

the reason why they use now Arcifno and not GRASS is not in the difficulties
with using GRASS (just try to use ARCINFO - not ArcView, which does not
do any serious work) all fed. agencies had to switch to ESRI products
because of the cost of using different systems. That is the same situation
why everybody is using WINDOWS.

The ease of use of GRASS is really a matter of a good GUI - you can digg-out
something about xgrass
which was one of the attempts to make GRASS easy to use. or GRASSLAND.
Most of your problems aren't really problems and are just a matter of creating
a better startup
for first timers - that could be done in a week or two.

>  >
>  > Yes; the default region is explicitly chosen by the user. Same for the
>  > current region. The only time that the current region is changed is if
>  > the user decides to change it.
>
> That is how it currently works.  I am asking you to change it.

I am not sure that anybody who has been using GRASS would agree with you on
this one.
For analysis and modeling the concept of region as it is now makes a lot of
work more efficient.

>  > If the user wants to change the region to match a particular map, they
>  > can use e.g. "g.region rast=map".
>
> And if it's been resampled because I had no clue what I was doing when
> I loaded the map???

The point is that if you want to do anything beyond looking at the maps you
need
to know what you are doing. If you want just to look at maps, you are looking
at the wrong software.

>
> Then they'll already have a default region set *for* them by somebody
> who already knows what they're doing.  Wouldn't it be nice if
> everybody had that benefit?

this is exactly what needs to be done and it should be fairly easy. You can
get that
if you load spearfish dataset and simply start GRASS with spearfish. maybe we
should just get
GRASS load a small sample location automatically (subset of spearfish?) a have
it start with it by default.
Then we need to change r.in.gdal to r.import so that is what people use the
first
when they want to load a new map and r.in.gdal will create a new location for
their data,
if the georeferenced info is different from spearfish- I assume that the user
will at least read the help for r.in.gdal.

Would something like this be feasible for GRASS5.1? And maybe the automatic
download and opening
the default LOCATION for GRASS5.0?

>
>
>  > > That is not a "fairly bizarre instance".  From the newbie's
>  > > point of view, it's normal (everything a newbie does is normal).
>  >
>  > "Bizarre" is a subjective term, but having exactly one raster map
>  > available is objectively an unusual situation. Sufficiently unusual
>  > that it's not worth adding special-case code for.
>
> Everybody who first runs GRASS is going to have to go from zero maps
> loaded to having one.  It's not unusual at all.

this is not really true - most  tutorials suggest you to start using GRASS
with the spearfish
LOCATION where you already have plenty of maps to play with.

>
>
> If that's what the user expects, then it's correct.  Doesn't matter if
> it makes the code more complicated.  The customer is always correct --
> and so is the user.

the problem is that different users and customers have different opinions
of what is correct. And even if you take a poll among users you may end up
with
wrong solution - as we have learned the hard way with the handling of NULLs.
So the user is not always correct, and you better be careful before doing
anything based on what user wants right now - because he won't like it next
week.

Helena