[GRASS-dev] WinGRASS Wiki Hacking

[Paul Kelly]

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Marco Pasetti wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on the WinGRASS Wiki page; I basically merged my personal GRASS To-Do list with it; please, take a quick look to check if I worked fine, thanks.

I take it we're talking about this page: 
http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WinGRASS_Current_Status

> Then, I think that section 2 (Installing binary snapshots) should be removed:
> I'm actually not providing binary snapshots in my WinGRASS job, and I think that no on eis doing the job. I planned to build weekly binary snapshots of both 6.4 and 7 development source code (and the installer script is already "prepared" for that), but at the moment I do'nt have enough spare time;

I don't think it should be labour intensive - it should be able to be 
scripted and run automatically. That said, I haven't got round to doing it 
either. But deleting all mention of it will discourage other people from 
helping with it.

> This said, I propose to remove this section.
>
> What do you think about?

I think there are a few reasons for keeping it. People might want to try 
old versions to see what is improved, or they might not have the bandwidth 
to download the monolithic installer, or they just might not like 
monolithic installers and prefer to run GRASS as a trial where it does not 
affect anything else on their system. Speaking for myself, I am always 
happy when I see a Windows program with a choice of downloads: monolithic
installer and zipped binaries that can be run directly and don't require 
installation. E.g. the TightVNC download page at 
http://www.tightvnc.com/download.html is a good example of a choice of 
Windows binaries.

Also at some stage I think we need to update the "Compiling by yourself" 
section to reflect that lots of the libraries are available from Gnuwin32 
at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/. And definitely mention that Tcl/Tk 
can be compiled from source and Activestate Tcl isn't a strict 
requirement.

"Nothing known" for XP/2000 issues sounds a little optimistic! I don't 
think the problem with running scripts when there are spaces in the 
install path has been fixed yet - has it? Off the top of my head there is 
also the mapset locking issue which we didn't decide on a best way to 
resolve yet. There are also IIRC various problems with CRLF line endings 
in some internal config files.

Re the FFmpeg linking problem I think Glynn said on the list that he had 
fixed it in SVN.

I had never heard of OSGeo4W (not sure if I like the name) - looks like it 
could be intersting.

P.S. Marco I'm not suggesting you fix all these things or that we need an 
answer to them! Just that they might be useful for us to consider.

Paul