[GRASS5] setting the initial region

[Mark P. Line]

Russell Nelson said:
> I believe that GRASS is made more difficult by the requirement to set
> the working region at start-up time.  I propose that the initial
> region should be "none".  Every program that uses the region should
> see that there is no region, and generate one that covers all the
> available data.
>
> In other words, if the GRASS user does not set a region, that means
> that they wish to operate on the entire area covered by their data.
>
> In other words, a sensible default.

So, you want the default to be set from the particular map being processed
by whatever module wants a region? How would this be handled when a module
has more than one input map? Wouldn't this ultimately lead to a great deal
of entropy in the user's database with potentially many different unnamed
regions being propagated onto output files, as it were?

Setting a region at start-up has the advantage of helping to keep all
useful regions organized and named. If I wanted to try to save a step and
thought I'd like a common default region, I think I'd script the start-up
to run <g.region -d>.


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX