[GRASS-dev] Making start of GRASS GIS easier for newcomers

[Moritz Lennert]

On 03/02/15 04:26, Yann Chemin wrote:
> It may sound out of place, but would it be possible to call this dialog
> anytime during a grass session to manage where you want to work through
> a known, unified interface?

Markus suggested something like this during our discussions at FOSDEM. 
Here's a summary of what I could see as the possible flow of startup:

**********
1) Run GRASS launch script => GUI opens directly

2) Have entries in the 'File'-Menu to

	- 'Open existing location'
	- 'Create new location'
	- 'Creat new mapset'
	- 'Manage locations and mapsets' (could also replace the two last entries)

3) When the user tries to add a layer to the display or to run any 
module, a warning pops up saying something like this:

"You have to create a new location or open an existing before being able 
to display any data" with buttons:

	- Open existing location
	- Create new location
	- Cancel

The 'Create new location' would bring you to the equivalent of the 
current location creation wizard.
************

The advantages of this would be to:

	- allow new users to see an open GUI before having to think about 
locations, etc
	- integrate location management into the GUI in a more visible way than 
via g.proj -c/g.mapset/etc

The idea is not to make this the only way to start GRASS, it would just 
be an alternative to the existing startup.

But in any case, this should not be for GRASS 7.0 which we should 
release very soon. New startup is not an API change so we can still 
introduce that in a point release.

Moritz