[GRASS-dev] Re: GRASS startup window patches, map names restrictions

[Helena Mitasova]

On Jan 6, 2007, at 2:10 PM, Maris Nartiss wrote:

> Hi all of You!
> I was not going to spawn such discussion, but it's damn good, as,
> hopefully, it will make GRASS more lamer friendly :)
>
> I have to apologizes about forgetting describe my patches. In my mind
> I was already looking how to fix other GRASS startup screen issues
> (Yes, there still are some of them) and forgot to tell everyone about
> what I'm doing. My apologies to all of you.
>
> I recreated gis_set patch with -b option, as it seems, that my text
> editor (kate) has set to strip whitespace at end of lines thus ending
> in unnecessary changes. Sorry about that. I still have to learn all
> that dev stuff :)
> As Michael has introduced refresh_loc procedure to refresh location
> list as result of any changes, I changed all places that had own
> location refresh code to use new location refreshments code.
> Second thing - previous code was safely expecting, that "cd" will
> never fail. I added new procedure to catch "cd" errors.
> Test yourself: cd GISDBASE && chmod -x LOCATION && grass63 && play  
> around
>
> One HUGE startup screen issue is still remaining (aside from new
> location creation) - user can enter as mapset/location name
> characters, that will NOT be supported by GRASS (i.e. mapset with
> UTF-8 coded character). That's why I wrote email about what is allowed
> in location/mapset/map names and what is not [1]. Please, take 5 mins
> of your precious time to answer. Thank You!

Maris -there are probably no explicit names restrictions in the  
documentation
except for "." forbidden in the vector map names but here are some  
recommendations
from our book - I was just working on it:

Although it is possible to use all combinations of
characters for the GRASS map names if the map name
or expression is enclosed within quotes,
it is safer to follow the name conventions described below.
First, it is important to avoid spaces and special characters, such  
as a comma,
dash, exclamation mark etc.  in GRASS map names.
Starting with GRASS6 dot is not allowed in the vector file names.
It is also useful to include at least one letter in the map name
to avoid confusion with numbers being treated as values, especially  
when using
the map algebra module r.mapcalc.

However, these are just recommendations not restrictions (e.g. I use  
underscore
or dash in location names all the time).

Helena

>
> Thank you all for your great work and let's try to make GRASS pass
> "The Monkey" [2] test :)

>
> Maris.
>
> [1] http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass-dev/2007-January/028360.html
> [2] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py? 
> project=Macintosh&story=Monkey_Lives.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by% 
> 20Date&detail=medium
> <gis_set.patch2>
> _______________________________________________
> grass-dev mailing list
> grass-dev at grass.itc.it
> http://grass.itc.it/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev