[GRASS-dev] GRASS 7: r.shaded.relief changed name?

[Moritz Lennert]

On 23/04/15 16:25, Vaclav Petras wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 8:41 AM, Carlos Grohmann
> <carlos.grohmann at gmail.com <mailto:carlos.grohmann at gmail.com>> wrote:
>  >
>  > That was an interesting discussion, I'm sorry I missed it (should pay
> more attention...)
>  >
>  > I think that modules names should be descriptive. When I started
> learning GRASS (and GIS), back in my Masters, I knew what
> r.shaded.relief would do. I wouldn't be sure in the case of r.relief or
> r.shade.
>  > If we have r.local.relief in the addons, it's great but a new user
> might not know about this, so the name still can cause confusion.
>  >
>  > Making the names shorter doesn't necessarily make them better, IMO.
>  >
>  > I'd say r.shaded.relief should stay as it was.
>  >
>  > As for r.shade, I'd go with something like r.drape.shade or
> r.shade.drape (because that's what it is doing) or r.shade.mapping (but
> this could be confusing as well - is it mapping the shades?..)
>
> Thanks for the comments, Carlos. I think the desire to have short names
> was definitively involved in the decision. Although they might be less
> readable they have different advantages. According to it's name I might
> see r.shaded.relief as something which shades the relief
> (r.relief+r.shade) but it just creates the shade from relief (r.relief).
> Also, r.relief, although not self-explanatory, does not invoke any
> association with relief metrics or relief-related parameters because I'm
> not familiar with these terms (also Google and Wikipedia seems to be
> quite ignorant about them).
>
> In any case, I should emphasize that although this is an important
> feedback, the discussion already happened and now it would be impossible
> or at least very hard to change it since we have already released 7.0.0.

As a side note: I think this also raises the question of how such 
changes are discussed and decided. I don't think many people realised 
that a thread entitled:

"[GRASS-SVN] r62845 - in grass/trunk/scripts: . d.shadedmap r.shadedmap"

discussed the renaming of modules.

I would encourage that in the future we go through a process that is 
minutely more formalies, i.e. that once the discussion in such a thread 
has ripened a new thread is created with subject making it clear that 
there is a proposal for a significant renaming of modules. Nothing worth 
an RFC, just a some "good practice".

Moritz