[GRASS5] Suggestions for gui discussion

[Glynn Clements]

Hamish wrote:

> > Oh and BTW the CPU spikes up to 100% and my laptop fan starts to go on
> > overdrive everytime I run i.points... Is there a busy loop somewhere
> > in the code?
> 
> It's a long standing bug in GRASS 6 which happens any time you use the
> mouse, e.g. d.zoom too.
> 
> feel free to fix it!

No, don't!

The mouse interaction aspects of the display architecture totally
suck. The facilities are barely adequate for d.where let alone
anything more involved such as i.points or v.digit.

There is nothing I would like more than to completely remove the
R_get_location_with_* functions from the display architecture at the
earliest possible opportunity.

A far better solution is to move all interactive functionality into
either QGIS, d.m or individual Tcl/Tk programs.

The whole display system would be so much simpler (and easier to
improve) if the (trivial and almost worthless) interactive features
were removed.

E.g. we could kill off XDRIVER and merge the PNG driver into
libraster, so d.* programs can just spit out image files for use by
the GUI. Programs which are currently limited by the minimal
capabilities of the display architecture could use more advanced
techniques for generating the images, e.g. PostScript (via
gs -sDEVICE=pngalpha) or OpenGL (via osMesa).

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