[GRASS-dev] what's going on in r39326

[Maris Nartiss]

<rant>
It's impossible for single person who spends only hes free time for
development to check all possible scenarious on all possible
hardware/software versions. If code looks sane, we need to assume that
it works unless somebody provides evidence that it doesn't work. I
don't have a Mac (I saw one last year when we had guest lecturer from
Germany), nor grid running supercomputer, neither I run GRASS on
windows. Neither I can imagine any (abusive) way how GRASS is run or
used. Sorry. I have to relay on other GRASS developers who run such
software to test various GRASS parts. Linux developers break GRASS on
Mac. Mac developers break GRASS on Linux. Both break GRASS on Windows.
That's how GRASS development is going already for long time and I
don't see how it could be changed in nearerst future (unless somebody
get's paid for developing and testing everyting on anything). Unless
GRASS gets paid full time developer team, we have to accept, that
development branches (trunk, devel) migh be broken time to time and
that we (developers, users) have to keep an eye on any new bugs
introduced by ourselfs or others.
</rant>

As I wrote - if GRASS_BATCH_JOB is set, everything *should* be fine. I
tested on my Gentoo Linux box and GRASS was able to run from cron when
GRASS_BATCH_JOB was set. Still I can *not* give any guarantee that it
may not be broken on some rare system. Starting GRASS without
GRASS_BATCH_JOB by it's startup script (grassxy + init.sh) is abuse
and should be eliminated.

As for launching plain GUI without terminal - IMHO we should not
change this within 6.x timeframe. As I wrote - GRASS 7 is open for new
ideas.

As all of You like shell code ;-)  I commited anotherone snippet. Feel
free to discuss :P
https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/changeset/39350
(Not tested on Mac or Windows. wxGUI should be unaffected, still not
tested as wxGUI doesn't work on my Linux box at all (6.4, 6.5, 7).
wxGUI devs - what's happening if user closes terminal before closing
wxGUI? IMHO wxGUI also should be cleaned up in case of exit from GRASS
and also should provide a way how to terminate not only GUI but also
whole GRASS session.)

Maris (just freaking out).

PS. Now I understand why GRASS has issues. Such huge discussion for
small change and no serious feedback for large and serious changes as
per r39323 :(

2009/9/30, Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org>:
> Hi Maris,
>
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Maris Nartiss <maris.gis at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello everyone.
>> I was not expecting so much communication for such little change. I
>> must blame my language sk33lz as I'm not able to explain what it does
>> ;)
>>
>> First - Markus - only way how to really check wheither batch jobs are
>> broken is to test that. Theoretically if You have set GRASS_BATCH_JOB
>> env variable You should be just fine.
>
> Well, I don't think that the concept could be to accept breakage of
> existing things to fix another issue. In general, it should be task
> of the person who makes the change to assure that functionality
> close-by (same file) remains. At least as much as possible.
>
> In any case, I'll test myself as well since the GRASS_BATCH_JOB
> functionality is essential for my daily GIS work.
>
> Markus
>