[GRASS-dev] Some ideas about future GRASS development

[Hamish]

discussion is useful; I've added my comments to the wiki's Talk page.
maybe not surprisingly I've started with the cautious approach ...


cc'd:


fwiw I'm not in favour of the R CRAN approach for GRASS.

    * One of our best selling points vs. the competition is that you don't have to buy expensive addon toolboxes to have it do what you want to do.
    * It makes it a lot harder for new users to get started with what they want to do. Even when done well it's a brittle system dependent on 100% uptime servers etc. which in practice do not exist.
    * Non-"core" modules will be neglected by the core devs and die from bit rot. (outside of grep's reach)
    * Those "non-core" modules have personally led me into all new ideas and directions outside of my normal field of study, which has rather positively affected the direction of my career and let me solve problems in novel ways for my peers that only cross-discipline tools/perspective could introduce us to.
    * Our download size is only about 25ish megs. that's tiny. Docs are bigger than code. Windows deps "aren't our fault" and switching to a different distribution model won't help that much at all.
    * Rather than focus development I fear it will dilute it. Divided we fall..
    * Big change is big work which could more productively be funneled into more critical pursuits. (I am not against needed change, but very against change-for-change's-sake.) 



regards,
Hamish