[GRASS-dev] WinGRASS Plans

[marco.pasetti at alice.it]

Hi all,
 
I would like to talk with you about new ideas/changes related to the WinGRASS Project:
 
 
ITEM 1
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I bought a new notebook with Vista installed, and I'm building a new MSYS environment (+ GRASS, obviously) on it; I hope that future testings will confirm that the binaries built here will be fine for both XP and Vista.
 
Since now (I'm still building) I introduced the following changes:
 
- added the libjpeg support (specially needed for QGIS, actually)
- upgraded libpng from the 1.2.24 to the 1.2.29 release
- upgraded GSL from the 1.9 to the 1.11 release (actually, only another QGIS requirement)
- upgraded PostgreSQL from the 8.2.6 to the 8.3.1 release
- upgraded SQLite from the 3.5.6 to 3.5.9 release
 
then I planned to add:
 
- AVCE00 and E00Compr Libraries (built from source, see here for the license: http://avce00.maptools.org/avce00/avce00.html#license) for the v.in.e00 module
- GPSBABEL (prebuilt binaries, released under GPL; see http://www.gpsbabel.org/download.html) for the v.in.gpsbabel module
- FFMPEG (built from source; it is released under LGLP/GPL; see http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/legal.html) for the 3D NVIZ animations
- gettext (GNU GPL?) for the nls GRASS support
 
any suggestions? what should I add more?
 
In the WinGRASS Current Status Wiki (ToDo -> Dependencies) I read: compile with wx for wx gui v.digit replacement
IIRC, to enable wxWidgets in the MSYS build we need a compiled (not prebuilt) version of Python, but, at the moment, it's not possible to compile Python under MSYS/MinGW. Is it (or will it be) strictly necessary to build the new v.digit module?
 
 
ITEM 2
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Since now, the WinGRASS installer comes with a README html file built in. That file is the same published on the GRASS website; that means that we actually have a redundant replication in our SVN: the same file in /root/grass-web/trunk/grass63/mswindows/native and in /root/grass/branches/develbranch_6/mswindows/Extras
I would like to remove the REAME.html file from the installer (and thus from the grass/..../Extras folder) and replace it with an http link to the README.html into the GRASS web site. Thus we will remove the redundant replication and I will avoid the problem to always check the differences from those two files.
 
 
ITEM 3
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I would like to add some images and *icons* to the WinGRASS web page, as done here http://www.webalice.it/marco.pasetti/grass/BuildFromSource.html, and change the page structure such as the web-page of GRASS on MacOSX (http://grass.osgeo.org/grass63/binary/macosx/), moving the *download section* from the top of the page to the main html document itself (that also means that I'll probably need to rename it from README.html to index.html, but it depends on the current apache settings)
 
Then it would be good to also add a *Binary Revision History* section where to explain the changes occurred between the different GRASS binary releases
 
 
ITEM 4
--------------------------------
 
Since I'm very short of spare time, but the GRASS BuildFromSource document is a relevant documentation for the GRASS community, I think that I could move the Building Guide directly into the grass-web mswindows folder, waiting for better times when I'll definetely put it into the official wiki.
 
  
ITEM 4
--------------------------------
 
Since Windows users cannot build binaries by themselves, it would be good to build and distribute also the GRASS AddOns. I'm not sure now how to distribute them (even if I've got some WIP ideas), but I surely need to create a simple procedure to build and install them all in a separated directory, with a build procedure indipendent from the GRASS build procedure itself.
 
Since now I built addons putting the sources in the GRASS source tree and adding the addons to build in the general make files (for example adding r.horizon into the list of building modules in /raster/Makefile). But if I put the addons sources outside the main GRASS source tree, I would need to change the paths from relative to absolute in each module, and then create a Makefile for each addon module... too much work for a frequent task! Any suggestions?
 
Thanks for all your patience,
 
Marco
 
 
 
 
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