[GRASS-dev] GRASS 7: renaming of some modules

[Paul Kelly]

On Sun, 12 Oct 2008, Markus Neteler wrote:

>>> Any objections (the motivation is obvious)? I would also update
>>
>> Hi Markus,
>> Can you elaborate on the motivation? As it is I feel an obvious objection is
>> that this implies there is no other way to import raster and vector data
>> than through GDAL and OGR respectively - but I count 8 r.in.*, 14 r.out.*, 4
>> v.in.* and 6 v.out.* modules in 7.x. So IMHO it is confusing.
>
> Well, teaching GRASS over the year almost always brought up the
> newcomer question: "Where [censored] is the import module?".
> r.in.gdal or v.in.ogr is *not* obvious at all.

Thanks - surprisingly it wasn't actually obvious to me that the motive was 
newbie confusion! And yes I agree, good point - I also vaguely remember 
when starting GRASS being confused as to when r.in.gdal might be useful. 
And taken alone, r.import and r.export are very good names, easy to 
remember and also quick to type. I guess it's just the inconsistency that 
will then exist with r.in.* and r.out.* that I'm concerned about.

If r.in.gdal was renamed to something like r.in.multi or r.in.various that 
would be one way of preserving the consistency. Renaming r.in.* to 
r.import.* and r.out.* to r.export.* at the same time as renaming 
r.in.gdal to r.import would be another possiblity for preserving 
consistency. Neither of those are ideal; I'm not seriously suggesting 
either of them.

Is the idea of the proposal then to make new users see r.import as the 
standard import tool they should try first, and that r.in.* are legacy 
modules to look at if they have difficulty or special requirements? If so, 
I guess I'm generally in favour of it after all.

Paul