[GRASS-dev] v.edit map

[Moritz Lennert]

On 09/07/09 16:56, Martin Landa wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 2009/7/9 Moritz Lennert <mlennert at club.worldonline.be>:
>>> should be 'map' in v.edit (for GRASS7) replaced by 'input/output'?
>>> When options are specified incorrectly or the module crashes, vector
>>> is not backuped, data are lost. The input/output paramaters would be
>>> probably better for this module.
>> Not too sure about this: this would mean that you create an intermediate map
>> for every small edit. Why not create a flag for allowing the creation of a
>> backup copy of the original map (which could be the default, so flag would
>> then disable creation of backup map) ? Thus you get the security of being
>> able to find the last version of the map before v.edit, without populating
>> your mapset with a large number of intermediate maps.
> 
> or to make 'output' parameter optional. I.e. if 'output' is not given
> then the vector map is modified directly otherwise saved as 'output'.

The problems I see with this are

- You don't know beforehand that v.edit will crash and so you might 
think that you don't need it...
- You need to find a new name for the output, even though it is the same 
map. This easily leads to name inflation à la map1, map2, map32, etc ;-)

With the security backup copy (in the same logic as many text editors, 
etc), you will always have the security (but can disable it if you 
prefer), but you can keep the same map name.

Moritz