[GRASS5] a set of wishes for GRASS 5.7

[Michael Barton]

You guys have done a FANTASTIC job, and I am not complaining about this 
at all. You can only do so much. However, it is still difficult to 
manage attribute data from within GRASS. It seems that the main focus 
so far has been getting data out in diverse ways and using gdal and ogr 
to get data from elsewhere in. Personnally, I agree that these have 
priority. But, what I do requires a fair amount of data creation--which 
is why I've followed the improvements to v.digit with much interest. 
This is also the source of my wish for better attribute data 
entry/editing tools. AFAICT, db.select is a query tool. db.execute can 
of course issue sql update queries. However, this is different from a 
basic data editor. Answering Radim's response at the same time, 
OpenOffice for Mac is still at the 1.0 stage and does not include dbf 
support. Even if it did, this is a lot of program to install, just to 
edit dbf files. I have Excel and can use that, of course. It would 
still be nice to work within GRASS as was possible previously (albeit 
in a somewhat clunky way). My hope was to inspire another programmer to 
take up this task. A search on Sourceforge suggests that the tools are 
there to do some kind of simple editor.

I haven't tried to compile QGIS to see if it runs on my Mac yet, so it 
is nice to know that it has an editor. As Radim describes it, this 
should do the trick. More complex things could be done with db.execute.

Michael
____________________
C. Michael Barton, Professor
School of Human Origins, Cultures, & Societies
PO Box 872402
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ  85287-2402
USA

Phone: 480-965-6262
Fax: 480-965-7671
www: <www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton>
On May 10, 2004, at 6:58 AM, Markus Neteler wrote:

> Really? The SQL support (see db.execute, db.select) is not that bad.
> Please keep in mind that there are less than two full-time developers
> only for 5.7. Given that the new functionality is impressive!
>