[GRASS-dev] GRASS-TNG

[Markus Neteler]

Radek Bartoň wrote on 02/22/2007 01:04 AM:
> On Thursday 22 of February 2007 00:19:14 tlaronde at polynum.com wrote:
>   
...
>> Secondly, calling this: GRASS-TNG (I suspect: The New Generation) and
>> having as a goal not to do anything real, but explaining to others how
>> they should work is something that I would be unlikely to appreciate
>> (the tone of my mail should make this clear).
>>     
>
> If there is a problem calling this project GRASS-TNG (legal or moral) I'm 
> sorry and I'll change a name but I'd like to hear this from someone how can 
> trully say that (Markus? or maybe you?). This name wasn't purely just my idea 
> and name does not matter. This kind of project can live even without any name 
> since there are no commertial interests.
>   

To me it sounds a bit like "name hijacking" which will generate
confusion. OSGeo has
developed branding rules, logo usage and so forth. I hope that we don't
have to do
the same here. It worked for the last 25 years that people, developing
something new,
also chose a new name (see KerGIS etc).
Since you dislike the GRASS code, I don't see any reason why you should
take its
name and logo. I see a moral problem here.

But I don't think that anyone is opposed to implementing new ideas.
Personally,
I believe much in code evolution rather that rewriting things from
scratch. At
least, my lifetime doesn't suffice to do the latter, replication years
of scientific
work which then gets coded into software. But you are probably younger
than me :-)
Maybe you underestimate the years of testing which have been done within the
GRASS project. New developers are always welcome.

Of course I am looking forward you new parallelized GIS with n-dimensional,
topological vector engine and 4D support for all data types (also hybrid
r/v would
be fancy). No kidding, new code is pretty needed and the topological
vector engine
really needs optimization. In my personal work, I suffer from the lack of
time series support (I worked around it with scripts). So, also that's hot.

Could you give me some more details why an object oriented approach
is fancy (for us, for our applications)? AKAIK there is only Smallworld
doing
that, so there must be a reason why GIS industry didn't choose the concept.

Concerning C++: The module causing most portability problems in GRASS
is r.terraflow (the only C++ module). If you look at the DebianGIS list,
the GDAL package there is pretty old due to C++ compatibility problems.
AFAIK a major pain for DebianGIS users.
As Frank stated (and I am sure that he knows his business), the C++ ABI
is pretty fragile and causing tons of extra problems.

BTW: You can use GRASS GPL commercially (make money by using it).

Radek Bartoň wrote on 02/21/2007 09:52 PM:
> For now is GRASS-TNG in stage of taking ideas on paper (a electrical
> one :-)) but later this can help a lot.
Please use a different name in the publication.

My 0.02 cents,
Markus