[GRASS-dev] Feedback from a FOSSGIS course

[Michael Barton]

Sajith,

Thanks for the feedback. A few responses below.


On 5/18/07 4:43 AM, "Sajith VK" <sajithvk.list at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I have been using FOSS GIS tools, especially GRASS, for last few
> years. We are trying to promote the use of FOSS GIS over here. As part
> of this, we have conducted a course on "FOSS GIS", conducted by my
> organisation, Kerala State Electronics Development Corporation
> (KELTRON), for a transport research and development organisation named
> NATPAC over here. This mail is to share the experience, and some
> feedbacks and suggestions we got.
> 
> It was a seven day course, conducted in two batches, having around 10
> participants per batch. The group included a few AutoCAD digitisation
> people, a few ArcGIS experts and some scientists. In general, FOSS GIS
> has been accepted by the all participants. Almost all requirements of
> the people could easily be done in FOSS GIS, and some are much better
> than proprietary counter parts (GRASS vector architecture, etc). They
> will be using FOSS GIS for some of their projects.
> 
> We used Ubuntu GNU/Linux as operating system. A custom CD covering
> major FOSS GIS tools was created to support the course. Major
> suggestions from the participants are,
> 
> a. Undo/Redo facility in GRASS digitisation (or GRASS-QGIS digitisation)
> 
> b. Copy-paste facility for copying features during digitisation
> 
> c. Facility for displaying Graphs and Charts in QGIS (Like
> d.vect.chart in QGIS)
> 
This IS in GRASS. d.vect.chart is a GRASS module, not a QGIS module. In
QGIS, it is only available as a GRASS plugin. It is on the GUI menu in fact.
So it¹s odd that you didn¹t see it.
> 
> d. Improvements in GRASS GUI (I think no need to mention)
> 
Actually this is not very helpful. I looked at the attached text file and it
is equally not helpful. TclTk indeed has it¹s own ³look² that may not be as
slick as some. But the usability is a lot more important. Switching from
TclTk to wxPython may make it look nicer, but that won¹t make it necessarily
more usable (though IMHO, it is no less useable than other high-end GIS
systems; but we¹d like to make it more useable than others).

Which version are you using. The GUI in TclTk has been updated in many ways
even since 6.2.0. So it would help to learn some specifics to see if they¹ve
already been addressed. The fact that you have a lot of crashes makes me
suspect that you are working with an early, less stable version. But it may
be due to other issues. Under what circumstances go you get a crash?
> 
> I am attaching a detailed note herewith. Shall I add them as feature requests
> in issue tracker?
> --
> Sajith VK
> Change the rules, or the rules will change you :Kumaranasan


__________________________________________
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


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/attachments/20070518/30fd1c28/attachment.html