[GRASS-DEV] Re: [GRASS5] GEM in CVS

[David Finlayson]

On 5/4/06, Hamish <hamish_nospam at yahoo.com> wrote:
> For myself, the luxury of having numerous data analysis tools right at
> my fingertips, which would normally only exist outside of my usual
> discipline, has really helped to broaden my scientific horizons and
> analyze my data (and think!) in all sorts of interesting new ways.

I think that there are good examples of free software using
repositories of add-on packages very effectively. For example, R (the
statistics package) comes with basic functionality out of the box, but
there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of cool add-on packages that can be
downloaded and installed with a click of the mouse.

Being included in the GRASS-sanctioned package manager would be pretty
good motivation to make your code free.

The key, I think, is having a nice interface to the packages that
encourages browsing the package list and makes it really easy to
download, install and remove packages as needs change. (Note that R
packages even update the installed html manual when a new package is
downloaded!)


--
David Finlayson