[GRASS5] Start planning for GRASS 6.2?

[Michael Tiemann]

Michael, it's always great to see GRASS posts from you!  I share your
enthusiasm...

On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 22:53 -0700, Michael Barton wrote:
> It seems like GRASS 6.1 is pretty stable, although the flood of new
> and improved features continues. I haven’t seen any major problems in
> quite awhile. And there are LOTS of improvements in 6.1 over 6.0.
> Should we begin thinking about creating a 6.2 GRASS by the end of the
> year and moving new development to a 6.3?

This is a very interesting prospect, and one that I would like to see
happen.  My selfish reason (not meant to influence GRASS too much, but
perhaps only a little) is that I believe that Fedora Core 5 (FC5) will
be in its final stages of testing around the end of the year.  As with
all Fedora releases, it's going to roll up lots of latest and greatest
open source technologies, many of which are hitting their own major
stable version numbers (such as OpenOffice.org 2, but many others, too).
I would very much like to see GRASS 6.2 be one of the packages that's
ready to be packaged for FC5, since that will establish a new "stable"
version that can ultimately be packaged for Red Hat's commercial
products.

> There are a couple features I want to ask about that would round out a
> 6.2 release very nicely. One is the inclusion of the GRASS Extension
> Manager (GEM) nearing completion by Benjamin Ducke. This would make
> GRASS more easily extensible if included in the source distribution. 

I have not myself played with it, but one extension that I'm starting to
look at is some way to regain 3D model import functionality.  The loss
of the OpenDWG libraries (due to not being GPL-compatible) is a bummer.
I am presently browsing source code for blender and verse
(http://blender.org and
 http://uni-verse.org/What_is_Uni-verse_about.4.0.html  ) to see if the
verse server or blender's native code provides a convenient way to re-
acquire 3d model import.  I've been told that the place to hook that in
is the v.in.ogr code, but I haven't yet looked at whether the extension
manager is a way to add this functionality without having to recompile
GRASS every time I try something new on the blender or verse side.

> The other is a better attribute database management system (some kind
> of a spreadsheet like form for data tables, with some basic editing,
> selecting, and maybe even querying).

I /love/ this idea.  I think it would be one of the most powerful things
we could offer.

>  There was some discussion a short while back about adapting an
> existing set of tools for this, tied to implementing SQLite (I can’t
> remember who at the moment). More recently, the possibility has been
> raised about making SQLite the default attribute data management
> system—although having briefly looked at the new system used by Open
> Office 2, I wonder if we might want to think about heading in that
> direction (or does the Java platform make it difficult?). Is this a
> possibility in the near future?

I think we should look hard at solutions that integrate directly with
OpenOffice.org.  OOo Calc is not my favorite spreadsheet, but it's a
very popular one, and to be able to integrate GRASS into OOo would be to
immediately reach thousands of potential users who want to plot
demographic (and other) data against things like US states or countries
or counties, etc.

> So, is it time to plan for a new release?

I hope so...

M