wingrass: launching gui and shell [was: Re: [GRASS-dev] Wingrass and TclTk]

[Paul Kelly]

Hello everyone

On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Moritz Lennert wrote:

> On Wed, October 31, 2007 11:29, Benjamin Ducke wrote:
>> The start command does actually work to put gis.m in the background.
>> I changed init.bat to read:
>
> I propose to do it in this (slightly modified) way:
>
> In init.bat:
>
> ===
> rem Get LOCATION_NAME to use in prompt
> FOR /F "usebackq delims==" %%i IN (`g.gisenv "get=LOCATION_NAME"`) DO @set
> LOCATION_NAME=%%i
>
> cd %HOME%
> prompt GRASS %GRASS_VERSION% $C%LOCATION_NAME%$F:$P $G
> start "GRASS %GRASS_VERSION% Shell" cmd.exe /E:ON /F:ON /V:ON
>
> %WINGISBASE%\bin\gis.m.bat
> ===

I'm trying to follow what's going on here but it's  bit confusing - would 
help if somebody posted a diff of the proposed changes to init.bat (the 
usual way). Have a few comments anyway about my original philosophy of why 
init.bat does things the way it does, which hopefully might help clarify 
things.

There is not supposed to be a command-prompt running separately from that 
included in gis.m - I thought we were moving towards the idea of having a 
command prompt built into the gronsole Window and using that (I think it's 
improved further in wxgrass) - so that was the point of that. I think it 
is confusing for new users having to type exit in a command Window to 
totally exit GRASS as well as just going File-->Exit in the GUI menus (is 
that what's being proposed here?).

If somebody wants a GUI and console then I think it's OK to require them 
to start GRASS in text mode and run gis.m from the command prompt. So I 
actually think Moritz's new gis.m.bat is a really good idea. I just was 
too lazy to get round to implementing that before. And there was some 
complication about the way the gis.m Shell script was generated although I 
think I simplified things a little bit.

Also I'm not sure what the "cd %HOME%" is for. GRASS on Unix doesn't 
change the directory you were in before starting it AFAIK - why should it 
on Windows? And how important is the "/E:ON /F:ON /V:ON"? I just want to 
be sure we're not introducing anything that doesn't *need* to be there and 
is only likely to confuse people in years to come.

>
> where gis.m.bat simply contains:
>
> ===
> @ start "GIS Manager" "%GRASS_WISH%" "%WINGISBASE%/etc/gm/gm.tcl"
> ===
>
> This way we have a functioning gis.m.bat which one can also launch from
> the command line if grass was started with in text mode.

That's a good idea. ISTR that the gis.m shell script now also runs gis.m 
in the background, i.e. you don't need to run it as "gis.m &" any more - 
is that right?

We'd need to make sure GRASS_WISH is always set though. Currently init.bat 
doesn't require it to be set and will use Window's association of .tcl 
files with the Tcl interpreter to start gis.m correctly if not. But I 
don't think it's unreasonable to require GRASS_WISH to always be set and 
we could change that.

> Nice also to finally get rid of this empty and useless cmd.exe window we
> had before.

Do you mean with the changes the init.bat script is exiting/abandoning 
after starting gis.m? The whole point of it staying running (and as a 
side-effect keeping a command prompt Window open - I don't know how to 
hide that but I presume it's possible) is because there are actions that 
run as part of exiting GRASS - the main one being deleting temporary 
files, but also setting the PATH back to its original value if a 
command-line session was being run. If we exit init.bat after starting 
gis.m then the temporary files won't be deleted on exit which I don't 
think is a good idea.

> Only thing which is a bit annoying: you have to close the two (cmd and
> gis.m) seperately (i.e. gis.m does not close when you type exit in
> cmd.exe). But that's minor in my eyes.

Users who don't normally use the command line may not know to type exit - 
I think it's a big enough issue not to introduce it as a problem when it 
wasn't there before - see my comments above.

> One question I don't know how to solve, though: just as for other scripts
> a gis.m.bat is created during compilation, which contains:
>
> @"%GRASS_SH%" -c '"%GISBASE%/scripts/gis.m" %*'
>
> However, I think that gis.m should run independently of whether someone
> has installed a shell, so I'd rather replace this bat file by the one
> above. This would mean creating some form of exception for gis.m to the
> below entry in include/Make/Script.make:

It was my idea for a while (never implemented it though) that the Script 
Makefile could look and see if there was a "Windows version" (i.e. the 
script name with a .bat extension) in the same directory, and if so 
install it rather than installing a wrapper to the Bourne shell version of 
the script. Would that perhaps be useful here if we got it working?

BTW sorry I've been so inactive in the discussions recently. I had very 
limited internet access for a much longer period than anticipated over the 
past month and a half, but have a regular connection again so should 
hopefully be able to contribute a bit more now. Have quite a backlog of 
other stuff to get through though.

Paul