[GRASS-dev] Re: [DebianGIS] build-indep for grass and other issues.

[Paul Kelly]

On Sun, 12 Nov 2006, Hamish wrote:

> Francesco P. Lovergine wrote:
>> Also having a better management of libraries would be nice. Libtool
>> could be complex but not evil as having no versioned libraries at all.
>> AFAIK there is not anything that can be defined a 'grass library'
>> with a stable versioned API.
>
> this post from a week ago may be of interest:
>  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.devel/16481/

Aha - so perhaps Markus or whoever added the version numbering into the 
library names did it because of Debian? I still don't think it's necessary 
because if a user has more than one GRASS version installed at once they 
are put in different directories.

IIUC is it true that the reason for making this fuss over version 
numbering and file locations is that Debian wants to install GRASS files 
in various places distributed across the system filesystem, rather than 
all one place? This is not a design assumption that has been made and 
would be a rather huge and pointless job to fix anyway - almost every part 
of GRASS assumes there is a $GISBASE directory under which the whole 
system is contained.

That's not to say it doesn't comply with a convention: the GRASS 
installation directory is (as I understand it) like a /opt-style 
directory, an add-on software package that includes its whole system under 
there, and the system-specific startup script (which really just contains 
the path to the GRASS installation directory) goes in /usr/local/bin. Neat 
and tidy. And different GRASS versions can be installed in different 
directories and have different startup scritps. I really think that is 
quite a simple and convenient solution the way it is? Well as Hamish says 
some things could be tidied, but not worth changing it just for the sake 
of it I think.

Paul