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

[Hamish]

Russell:
> GRASS has the reputation of being "the open source GIS
> package", which, technically, it is.  I, however, wouldn't recommend
> it to anybody but a GIS expert.

I'd recommend it to a non-GIS expert who knew UNIX well.
 (they're generally not above reading help pages and learning)

I'd recommend it to a non-UNIX expert who knew GIS well.
 (they could recognize the potential & power and stick out the hard times)


I'd be wary of recommending it to to a non-UNIX non-GIS user unless it
was packaged well (such as the GRASS 6 on MacOSX). And even in this last
case -if given Neteler & Mitasova's book- I think most in the science
field can get the hang of it after some due effort.

The new vector engine is a textbook waiting to be written...


Russell:
> Okaybut.  GRASS qua GRASS still needs to have a user interface that
> makes easy things easy.  If people are referred to GRASS, and they run
> 'grass' and they get the current user interface, then the front-end
> may as well not exist.

Out of curiosity: have you tried GRASS 6.0.beta1 or are you basing this
on the GRASS 5.7.0 fedora package? These use two different GUIs.


Marc:
> I'd be working about 10 times faster if I could use Java/Swing for GUI
> work, but that would introduce Yet Another Platform (albeit one that
> works on everything from cellphones to mainframes).

before the howls of protest (Java is non-Free software); the folks at
DebianGIS are making some great headway with getting java GIS packages
to run on Free software java clones.

checkitout:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-general/2005-February/000530.html

DebianGIS is making great progress in general actually:
http://pkg-grass.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl

there is JGrass, qGIS, JUMP, Thuban, et al. .. does GRASS really need
another GUI?

It would be great to know if JGrass would work using Debian's java
compatibility tools. (I have asked on that mailing list for someone to
try, hopefully they will)






Hamish