[GRASS-dev] where to store GRASS settings: GISRC and wx settings

[Markus Metz]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 1:37 AM, Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Markus Metz wrote:
>> In general I think it is a good idea to have all the
>> settings and other stuff, e.g. grass-addons,
>
> sorry to complicate the discussion, but fwiw the meaning of the
> grass-addons dir is another unresolved issue we'lll need to deal
> with-- it started life as something user defined to concatenate
> onto $PATH, but now is also used like --prefix=, and so we have
> this confusing hybrid of both.
>
That's why I suggested to store all per-user settings in one single
folder: .grass7/
>
>> in one single folder, and not scattered around. But that is a
>> design change already implemented in grass7.
>>
>> Since there seems to be a majority to not introduce these
>> changes to 6.x, I will revert the changes I did to 6.5 and also
>> change some backports from trunk to 6.x regarding the file
>> where wxGUI settings are stored, i.e. 6.x shall use .grasswx6
>> as in pre-6.4.2.
>
> to clarify what I meant & why-
>
> I'm not so concerned about ~/.grasswx6, as that's quite new
> and not as likely to be accessed by user's own scripts,
> literature, experience & expectations where to find things when
> things break (1,000 archive posts telling people to remove/edit
> that file if it gets broken), etc.
>
>
> What I am really really concerned about is changing ~/.grassrc6,
> which is a core file that has stood like that since 6.0, 6.2,
> 6.3.0, 6.4, and 'til now all our hard efforts to maintain
> compatibility through all the grass 6 line has been unwaivering*.
>
Agreed. I have reverted the changes to 6.5 yesterday.
>
> While not really relevant beyond the "it was like that in 6.x for
> historical reasons" understanding, fwiw I'd mention ~/.grassrc5
> and for earlier grass 4 "~/.grassrc" have been there since the
> 1990s, and perhaps the 1980s too? since stability = discipline *
> time, and one of our great strengths is time. whenever we cut
> old roots and reset that clock to 0 it's a great loss to one of
> our core assets.
>
? Is there somewhere in 6.x a check for the presence of .grassrc5 or
.grassrc if .grassrc6 is not existing?

There seems to be a reason why .grassrc6 is hidden, users are not
meant to know about its presence or even to hand-edit this file. If
the location or name of the rc file changes as for 7, all is needed is
once starting GRASS and defining GISDBASE, LOCATION_NAME, MAPSET.

I guess your objection is not so much about this particular file but
more general about not introducing changes of this kind to 6.x. IMHO,
changes to this file are less serious than changes to the API which
already took place from 6.4.0 to 6.4.2.

Markus M