[GRASS-dev] GRASS6.4.0 r.in.poly with lat-long broken?

[Helena Mitasova]

Has anybody tried to run r.in.poly with lat/long data in GRASS64 - it appears to be broken.
It creates a raster map with NULLs on my Mac RC6 version and apparently on linux as well -
see the message below. My colleagues at the Climate Center had to switch to GRASS63 to get their
Mapserver/OpenLayers application run with GRASS. I checked the repository and no changes were
made for past 21 months except for input=- option so I am not sure whether this is a bug or 
we are just doing something wrong. 

http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/browser/grass/branches/releasebranch_6_4/raster/r.in.poly

Below is the test example and the related nc_ll LOCATION, but it would be good to try it on some other data.
If this is a bug I would consider it critical because many people are trying to run GRASS with WebGIS
and drawing a polygon and then getting a report on what is inside that polygon or running some more complex 
analysis on it is among the most common tasks that people try to do that I have seen.

thanks for looking into this (we really don't want people to go back to 6.3),

Helena


So for r.in.poly, we needed to use lat/lon coordinates (i.e. didn't use coordinates in meters like you tested out) -- not only because the Mapserver/Open Layers stuff we created was giving the coordinates in lat/lon, but also because our projection was in lat/lon.  That file looked like this:

A
 -78.254 35.82
 -78.005 36.201
 -77.707 36.135
 -77.84 35.853
 -78.196 35.721
= 1 coord

So when we ran the r.in.poly function, no errors were output -- it appeared as though the layer had been created properly.  But when we tried to actually display the layer with the polygon, we found that no actual polygon with those lat/lon coordinates as vertices was ever created.
Another co-worker in my office had GRASS 6.3 on his Linux machine, and when we tried running the r.in.poly function with lat/lon coordinates on his machine, it worked beautifully.  That prompted us to put GRASS 6.3 on the other machines we had been using and take off the 6.4 RC versions -- and with 6.3, everything worked as expected.

http://courses.ncsu.edu/mea582/common/media/01/nc_ll.zip