[GRASS5] setting the initial region

[Glynn Clements]

Russell Nelson wrote:

> 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.

The term "every program that uses the region" is almost equivalent to
"every program". You are talking about re-writing most of GRASS.

There's also the issue of programs being unable to determine default
values for either the boundaries or the resolution.

Programs which don't read any maps (e.g. r.mapcalc where the RHS
doesn't refer to any maps) cannot determine defaults for any of the
region parameters.

Programs which don't read any raster maps (e.g. v.to.rast) cannot
determine defaults for the resolution.

Programs which do read maps may still not be able to determine
defaults, as there may not be an obvious correlation between the
boundary and resolution of any input maps and suitable settings for
the output maps; e.g. r.proj.

We already had this discussion a while ago, and the conclusion was
that your proposal wasn't feasible. Nothing has changed since then.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>