[GRASS-dev] Some ideas about future GRASS development

[Martin Landa]

Hi,

2010/5/10 Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com>:
>    * 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.

advanced Tools Manager could help with that, see the minimalistic approach [1].

>    * 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.

I am not afraid of that. Core should be minimalistic, the most modules
(e.g. v.net.*, etc) could be moved to grass-tools. Most of them will
be maintain in the same manner as now, they just live in separate
repo.

>    * 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.)

The main question is which modules should to moved from grass-addons
to trunk. Who will decide, PSC? As reference I can mention modules
from GIPE which has been moved to trunk few months ago.

Basically, I like the idea of minimalistic repo for libs and core
modules which will be maintained carefully to be very stable. And
grass-tools with solid and *maintained* modules. The rest in
grass-addons. Currently grass-addons contains a mess, you can find
very good modules but also unusable rubbish. The user is lost.

Martin

[1] http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WxGUI#Extension_Manager

-- 
Martin Landa <landa.martin gmail.com> * http://gama.fsv.cvut.cz/~landa