[GRASS-dev] Re: [GRASS-user] How to find out an angle between to points on the map (for r.plane, r.lake)

[Michael Barton]

On Mar 3, 2008, at 8:53 AM, Dylan Beaudette wrote:

> I see quite a bit of disconnect between the GUI development and core
> GRASS development (I am not helping this either). It would be a good
> idea to spend some careful thought, with lots of input from everyone
> involved to nail down the general plan for GRASS 7. I can see a lot of
> potential for hurt feelings (= lost developers) if a slow and methodic
> approach is not taken.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dylan

Actually, I don't think that there is that much of a disconnect. There  
is a lot of communication between the folks writing a lot of the C- 
code and those of us working on the GUI. I think we're all lurching  
along in more or less the same general direction. But it's a very big  
and very complicated project and coordination can always be improved.  
Regular discussions about new display architecture and the move away  
from C-modules with hard-coded interactivity limited to an aging xmon  
interface have been going on for nearly 2 years.

The whole impetus for the current TclTk GUI was to demonstrate that we  
could have an interactive display architecture that did not need to  
rely on interactive d.* modules in which it was hard-coded--and to  
provide an environment which could encourage C programmers to expand  
modules to work better with this approach. This has been largely  
successful especially because of good coordination between GUI  
development and core C-module development. The current Windows native  
version of GRASS would not have been possible without this work.

The move toward Python as a scripting platform seems very exciting for  
GUI development, but even more so for expanded core functionality.  
After working with it for a year and a half, I'm sold. We are slowly  
beginning to switch our scripting in my lab from bash to Python--with  
much better and easier to read and maintain code. The python GUI also  
has opened a lot of new possibilities that I think many will benefit  
from (e.g., the new attribute data management modules).

We need to keep talking about this and issues like 'where' to put  
different functions in the new architecture. Sometimes it's clear, but  
other times it's fuzzy. I hope I haven't hurt anyone's feelings. Mine  
are OK.

Michael