[GRASS-dev] Maximum safe map name size?

[Joel Pitt]

Hi all,

So I've been getting into all sorts of strife with hard-coded limits
on filename lengths in GRASS. Not hard-coded in a sense that they are
enforced (that wouldn't be an issue, because then I'd know about it!),
but in the sense that there are all these fixed buffer limits in
modules which don't gracefully handle filenames that get too long.
Instead it fails with cryptic messages, and since I've built a large
simulation framework/pipeline around GRASS, it makes everything else
fall over too.

I've been having trouble with r.random and r.reclass:

http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/800

I "fixed" those, but now the cell header for the reclassed map results in:

WARNING: Unable to open raster map

whenever I try to access it. Except, the header in cellhd looks
exactly the same as another file that's reclassed and works fine. The
only difference is that the working one reclasses a map with a short
name.

I can try to start fixing this (hints on where this process happens in
the libs appreciated), but basically I'm wondering, is all of GRASS
like this? If so, I don't have the time to fix what may be a huge job,
but can we at least make the libraries responsible for writing maps
complain (or fail) when a provided map name is too long?

Cheers,

Joel Pitt, PhD | http://ferrouswheel.me | +64 21 101 7308
NetEmpathy Co-founder | http://netempathy.com
OpenCog Developer | http://opencog.org
Board member, Humanity+ | http://humanityplus.org