[GRASS5] Re: [Fwd: whinging about GRASS again]

[Radim Blazek]

Russell Nelson wrote:
> No, that's not it.  It's not that they didn't like my solution.  It's
> that they didn't like my problem.  No solution can satisfy a
> non-problem.  

Not at all! The problem is evident. We just don't like the solution. You 
say "The trouble with GRASS is that, at its core ..." and you want to 
change the core, which can break everything.

Cefn Hoile wrote:
| The question is, could a straightforward modification of the UI tool be
| made to solve this problem, without threatening the generality of the
| toolset.

Exactly.

Russell Nelson wrote:
> I think the solution is just as you suggested: to create a front-end
> which is helpful.  Doesn't require any changes to GRASS.

This sounds much more reasonable than changing the core.

 > GRASS developers acknowledge that GRASS is hard to use
 > on one hand, but they also say that fixing that problem is not a
 > priority for them.

It WAS not the priority for me until last year. There were serious 
problems in GRASS vectors in 5.x. Do you know, that you can lose vector 
attributes immediately after import to 5.x? Because we also use GRASS 
for work, we needed something more reliable first. Now it is time to 
work on UI.


About the subject itself:
To start with GRASS without an existing location is realy painful.
I think that at least 2 improvements can be done:

1) We can create a list of predefined locations (name + description + 
projection + datum + region) which can be selected in startup screen 
instead of that terrible "Create location from EPSG"

2) The possibility to create a new GRASS location can be added to QGIS. 
The advantage of QGIS is, that a user can open and view imported files 
without GRASS. In GRASS it can take very long time until you see 
something and that is probably the most frustrating moment. Once the map 
is opened in QGIS, we know at least the region but possibly also the 
projections, because it can be defined in nice GUI in QGIS:
http://mpa.itc.it/radim/qgis/projection.png


Radim