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

[Michael Barton]

This is sort of beginning to sound like what we already have. That is, we have a button on the web site that downloads a demo data set that is already organized in a location and mapset.

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

voice:  480-965-6262 (SHESC), 480-965-8130/727-9746 (CSDC)
fax: 480-965-7671 (SHESC),  480-727-0709 (CSDC)
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton, http://csdc.asu.edu















> On Jan 30, 2015, at 3:19 AM, Rainer M Krug <Rainer at krugs.de> wrote:
> 
> Yann Chemin <ychemin at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> +1 for a button, but I am not sure sure a data download is that
>> necessary...
> 
> I think a download button would be useful as the demo location should be
> in the home directory so that the user can play with it.
> 
> The disadvantage would be that the user has to be online for this. A
> compromise could be to have
> 
> a) an archived location in package form, so that the archive is
>   installed but not the location. This would be an optional package.
> 
> b) A button which, depending on whether the grass-demodata package has been
>   installed, extracts the archived location into the home directory or,
>   if it has not been installed, suggests to download it.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rainer
> 
>> The button might just be a script creating a (several?) empty Location(s?)
>> in a directory that the user can choose.
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 30 January 2015 at 15:20, Moritz Lennert <mlennert at club.worldonline.be>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 29/01/15 17:43, Vaclav Petras wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On the MS Windows installer takes care of that by copying demo Location
>>>> to newly created grassdata dir in Documents and creating the rc file. Is
>>>> this enough? If not why? And do we want to do something similar for
>>>> cases when installation is not done by GRASS GIS? If startup detects no
>>>> grassdata it could just create the dir and copy the demo Location there,
>>>> so the only thing needed is to press Start button.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Don't forget that in many GNU/Linux distributions data is separated from
>>> applications in the packaging. So, either we have to tell users to install
>>> a specific data package (e.g. grass-demodata) or the startup screen needs a
>>> button: "Download and unpack demo data".
>>> 
>>> Moritz
>>> 
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>>> 
> 
> -- 
> Rainer M. Krug
> email: Rainer<at>krugs<dot>de
> PGP: 0x0F52F982