Announce: new GRASS 5 beta4 on Tuesday, 26. October

[Markus Neteler]

>  I'd let the distros sort it out. I know there's a Debian maintainer
>  working on a 4.2 version *.deb.  Each distro might want to muck with
>  the configuration anyway. However, as a bandwidth impaired user, I'd
>  appreciate parts of the system being broken up into more manageable
>  chunks. For instance, grass-core, grass-addins (SWAT, AGNPS, ANSWERS,
>  etc), grass-docs(html,ps,etc..), grass-sample-data. That 20MB file is a
>  long download (on a modem) if it succeeds, and many of thoses proggies
>  don't seem to compile by default anyway.

Hi Eric,

our plans are to split the GRASS into topic oriented
packages, say (just an idea)

 - base GRASS GIS backage
 - hydrology package
 - image processing package
...

We want to create such packages for the binaries as well as
source code.

The way to distribute shall be via WWW: We want to create a 
web page where the user can select packages of interest and
download them. Advantage: You do not have to download the
big package any more but can select parts of the code.

This can be realized (hopefully) for the next GRASS 5 release,
when the reorganization of the source code is finished. Reason
is that all the libraries have to go into the base package
etc. to avoid  dependency problems.

Greetings

  Markus Neteler