[GRASS5] Maximum number of categories

[Moritz Lennert]

Radim Blazek said:
> Bad news!
>
> I have discovered, that number of categories for each element is stored
> as 1byte. It was enough when only one cat of each field was allowed.
> Now each field may have many cats and 256 is not enough.
>
> I think that there are already too many 5.7 vector files in use,
> so I must increase 'coor' format version (5.0->5.1) [1], and to handle
> more versions
> for reading. Unfortunately it will not be possible to read new files in
> older versions
> of GRASS 5.7. I'll add first the code for reading and after some 1-2
> months also for writing,
> to minimize problems.
>
> Do you have other suggestions?

If the 'coor' format solution is a "second-best" solution in form of a
hack (please coorect me if it isn't), I would think that since 5.7 is
officially declared as development version, people have to live with the
risk of things being broken. So, I think it would be better to revise the
format completely and cleanly to include all necessary changes, instead of
finding other solutions that might be not as clean and then carry this
around for the next years.

Moritz