[GRASS-dev] Re: grass-dev Digest, Vol 9, Issue 16

[Michael Barton]

Thanks for the explanation Maris. This helps understand the goal of your
changes.


On 1/6/07 6:25 PM, "grass-dev-request at grass.itc.it"
<grass-dev-request at grass.itc.it> wrote:

> 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

They sound like good ideas. I did test it on my Mac right away and it
worked. I just didn't know what it did. Now that I do, I can look them over
too.

> 
> 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!

Don't know the answer to this. Maybe someone else does.

I think that new location creation is working pretty good now. You can use
EPSG codes pretty easily for a change (need to get the PROJSHARE issue
solved to avoid the annoyance of having to find the codes on Win and Mac
boxes though), and I think the create location by georeferenced file should
work on all platforms and for new startups now. It would be nice to have a
replacement for g.setproj, but maybe that is not as high a priority now that
the other methods work pretty well. What do you think?

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

I'm not sure that we can do this. :-\

But I agree that we need to do our best to make this easier to start, easier
to use, and more foolproof. My personal goal (not that I can achieve it
without a lot of help) is to make the GRASS UI better than the competition.
That is, it should be useable by normal humans at least ;-)

Michael

__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton