[GRASS-dev] grass-dev Digest, Vol 110, Issue 36

[Michael Barton]

The renaming and regularization of modules for the GRASS 7 release took place over multiple months IIRC. Martin and Markus sent out repeated requests/invitation for comment during this time.  There was a specific discussion thread for this but there was not a lot of comment for most of the modules. The discussion of whether and how to rename the module that is now called r.relief was on the dev list and lengthy, with quite a few people weighing in with different opinions (unlike most other renamed modules). There was a lengthy discussion thread for this too. I agree that the process needs to be open and transparent. But in this case, my recollection is that it was.

Michael
____________________
C. Michael Barton
Director, Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Professor of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Head, Graduate Faculty in Complex Adaptive Systems Science
Arizona State University

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On Apr 24, 2015, at 12:01 PM, grass-dev-request at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:grass-dev-request at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

From: Moritz Lennert <mlennert at club.worldonline.be<mailto:mlennert at club.worldonline.be>>
Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] GRASS 7: r.shaded.relief changed name?
Date: April 24, 2015 at 1:06:16 AM MST
To: Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com<mailto:wenzeslaus at gmail.com>>, Carlos Grohmann <carlos.grohmann at gmail.com<mailto:carlos.grohmann at gmail.com>>
Cc: Helena Mitasova <hmitaso at ncsu.edu<mailto:hmitaso at ncsu.edu>>, grass-dev <grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org>>


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> <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


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