[GRASS-dev] Re: [tlaronde: ticket #542: vector for GRASS 7]

[Hamish]

thanks for providing your comments Thierry.
I agree with a fair amount of what you say, specifically education is
more work but far better than reinvention (poorly). there certainly is
a lot of hidden wisdom in the grass code for us to learn from.

a few minor points:

> avoid the confusion between "lines" and "arcs" for example.

please, "polyline" is much better than arc. for one thing the name-
space is well and truly taken, for another it's the term the rendering
library uses, and for a last point from a mathematical standpoint an
arc to me is a pure curve not a broken line approximating a curved line.
(arguing semantics will always be a chore of picking the best from
among imperfect terms)

> merging the Sites as Points in the vector was, IMO, an error.

both have their strengths and their weaknesses, but regardless of that
it is done now and with minor extra-topological ugliness we can store
massive point datasets in the current framework. it's not ideal, and
we've lost users to eg PostGIS because of it, but this is not the
trickiest problem we face so we'll see what future solutions introduce
themselves.


> Secondly, the introduction of 3D in vector is not perhaps a great idea
> if you remember what a GIS is mainly for.

important: s/is/has been/
don't limit yourself by what others have done in the past.
to me the interesting thing about grass is not what it can do, but
what it could easily be extended to do.

I work in the water which is inherently a 3D environment, I think I can
speak for all our geologic, atmospheric, archaeological, and so on
refugees from other GIS when I say that the 3D support is a big reason
we use GRASS.


to me, the biggest software gap we have from a vector perspective besdies
the LiDAR problem is to get a mature non-encumbered reimplimentation of
the Triangle library out there to the world. (see nnbathy threads)


regards,
Hamish