[GRASS-PSC] Statement Nicklas Larsson

[Nicklas Larsson]

Dear GRASS Community,

Thank you very much for the nomination, I am greatly honoured!

I am a long time GRASS GIS user, ever since the first Mac OS X release in the beginning of the 2000’s, in my profession as an archaeologist. I started in 2020 to actively contribute to the project, initially mainly addressing bugs and improving the user experience on the Mac platform and was granted core developer status by the end of that year. Encouraged by the friendly atmosphere and warm welcoming of this community I have since then been an active contributor, with the more general goal of modernising and improving code quality.

Among the results from this work the GRASS code now compiles with `-Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -Werror` on both GCC and Clang (compared to the previous state with hundreds of warnings with only default settings); the embedded Ctypesgen Python package, responsible to generate the Python bridge to GRASS' C API, is now updated and in sync with upstream source; configure is updated to use autoconf 2.71 (a long awaited bump from version 2.13 released in 1999); the complete C/C++ code base is formatted with ClangFormat. I initiated the now adopted RFC 7 and 8 regarding programming language support.

In parallel with my engagement with GRASS GIS, I have taken over maintenance of a number of GIS software for the package-management system MacPorts, through which I have gained important experiences in building/packaging in general that may be very useful in the future development of GRASS. I have made considerable contribution to the ongoing collective work for adoption of CMake based building and the reorganisation of the GRASS installation to comply with Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

Irrespective of the outcome of this election I will continue to contribute to the GRASS GIS project, to further modernise and improve code quality, as well as improve availability/distribution. My two major immediate personal goals are to finish the CMake adoption (with FHS compliance) and a CI generated code-signed and preferably notarised Mac distribution (and as extension a similar CI generated package for Windows). Availability of GRASS through Conda package-management system is also an important goal.

As a PSC member I will be able to advocate for and work towards these broader as well as the more specific aims in coordination and cooperation with my fellow committee members.

Thank you for your consideration,
Nicklas