[GRASS-dev] possible bug - more coordination needed

[Hamish]

Hamish ha scritto:
> > It seems from that bug report that you are building
> > against grass trunk?

Paolo wrote:
> not: 6.4.1

sorry, I saw in http://hub.qgis.org/issues/4667
references to:
 r.external.all.py
 v.out.ogr.pg.py
 qgis.v.kernel.rast.py
 db.connect-login.pg.py

and just saw the 'trunk' when running 'locate' but not the source tree
it came from (qgis's).

so those are GRASS python scripts in qgis svn written by Radim which
use the GRASS python libraries.  hopefully with 6.4.2 'import from grass'
will be a lot more stable, in the past few releases it was still under-
going some new development. But that still will be very new and will
probably continue to change a little.

note that grass scripts (both python and shell scripts) need to be in
the system PATH to work correctly.


> > completely agree.
> >   - would a dedicated inter-project qgis-grass-plugin osgeo ML help?
> 
> not sure, don't think so

my thinking was that many grass devs probably can not keep up with the
qgis-dev mailing list traffic, and many qgis devs probably can not keep
up with the grass-dev ML traffic. so if there was a low volume ML for
interested parties from both dev teams it would be easier to keep up
to date.


> >   - what are the biggest issues with it
> > to work on right now?
> 
> My main concern is that occasionally interfaces are
> changed, without letting us know, so we have to spot the
> problems after they occur, and with the large number of
> modules, this is painful; many errors risk to go unnoticed
> for long, especially among less popular packages.

command line interfaces should not have changed at all since GRASS 6.0.0
in March 2005. the goal has always been that any command (script) written
for GRASS 6.x will be forward-compatible with any future GRASS 6.x ver.
The C API has changed a little with time :-(, but I don't think you use
that? In the case that it does change, the module should bomb out with
a GIS_H API mismatch error.
The python API is still being developed, so no guarantees of stability
there.

it is hard to predict unintended consequences, but we do our best..


Hamish