[GRASS-dev] doc 'upgrade' request for v.net.path

[Michael Barton]

Eric,

Here's something to add to the rapidly growing list. I was helping one of my
students work with vector networking, something I don't do a lot of. The
shortest path module, v.net.path is actually pretty easy to work with. But
the docs are so confusing that it took us quite awhile to figure out how to
specify the start and end point. There seems to be a fair amount of
extraneous stuff in the example that is not necessary to use the
module--maybe because most of this help file dates from the early days of
GRASS 5.7. It would be nice if someone who knows these modules well take a
look at them. I'm also copying the student, Andrea, in order to give her
your email because she is interested in helping develop documentation in
Spanish and has colleagues who might be able to help.

Here is a wish for someone else on the list...

Deciphering the docs for v.net.path, I figured out that the only ways to
specify start and end points  (AFAICT, but I could be missing something) are
1) to pipe them into the command or 2) put them into a text file and open
the text file with the command. Both seem overkill, since all you have to
give the command is the following string:

"1 [startcat] [endcat]"

...where [startcat] = the cat number of the starting node and [endcat]= the
cat number of the ending node. It is still unclear to me what the "1" is for
since it doesn't seem to apply to layer (i.e., the nodes in a network are
normally in layer 2).

It would seem a lot easier to simply have a "startend=" option built into
v.net.path that takes 2 cats separated by a comma.

Michael
__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Studies
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


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