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

[Frank Warmerdam]

Russell Nelson wrote:
>  > r.in.gdal fully supports GeoTIFF (among others).  There are import
>  > routines for some image types that don't have such information. r.in.bin
>  > supports generic raw binary formats, for instance.
> 
> Okay, then perhaps libgdal should be required to build grass, and
> should be distributed with (or at least alongside) grass.  I was quite 
> confused when r.in.gdal complained that it couldn't find a shared
> library.  Can someone explain what problem is solved by building
> r.in.gdal even though libgdal is unavailable?

Russell,

This was my bright idea.  My thinking was that it would be easier for people
to add libgdal.1.1.so to their system if they discover they need r.in.gdal
than it would be to go back, reconfigure and rebuild GRASS.

I would *strongly* encourage all those preparing binary distributions of
GRASS to include libgdal.1.1.so and I am willing to help with build problems
on different platforms to enable that.  However, if I am someone who just
wants to build GRASS myself so I can fiddle with a few programs I wouldn't
want to have a development kit for GDAL be required.

While PROJ is included with the GRASS source tree (as are some other
components) I think GDAL is kind of biggish to do that with.

However, the way I incorporated GDAL support into GRASS is peculiar.

For GRASS 5.1, if we renamed r.in.gdal to r.import and write it into
tutorials and so forth as the standard way of importing common raster
formats, I think we might want to revert to a more conventional way of
linking against GDAL.

But, I would like to stress that even then I am not sure that GDAL should
be required. I hate it when systems require me to installed a huge number
of other support libraries before I can build them.  I think this can
really put off new developers.  Perhaps what we need is to streamline
mechanisms whereby a developer can build selected GRASS commands from
source and overlay them on an existing built GRASS tree.  This may be
possible now, but I am not convinced it is easy (or I would do it!)

Best regards,

-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent