[GRASSLIST:1098] Re: GRASSLIST digest 1136

[Scott W Mitchell]

I have been using GRASS on my Mac running OS X for a couple of years 
without trouble.  The major caveat is that I have not needed the 
database access routines.  I haven't had time to investigate them yet, 
so am not much help to you there.  However, other people should not get 
the impression that GRASS as a whole is a problem under OS X.  The 
commands that I regularly use all work perfectly, and it is news to me 
that the database stuff doesn't.

I normally compile from source on my own machine, but I get a lot of 
the packages GRASS depends on from fink.  I have been following 
development versions of 5.0.x with regular recompiles, and haven't had 
any troubles in months getting it to compile.  The GRASS development 
people have been making a good effort to make the build system 
recognize the OS X platform and use the proper compile-time 
adjustments.  And just recently, the "experimental" GRASS 5.1 was 
successfully modified to compile under OS X too.

A colleague of mine (and I provide most of his "tech support" on this) 
uses GRASS from fink, and has had no troubles (but he doesn't use the 
postgres stuff either).  I think that this is a good option for 
installing GRASS, and am sorry to hear you didn't hear from the 
maintainer about your troubles.  The R stats package IS available 
through fink, by the way, contrary to what you wrote in one of your 
posts.  Perhaps we can discuss what specifically was wrong with the 
package ?  Again, if it has only to do with the postgres stuff, I'm 
probably not too useful. I have seen lots of traffic going by on the 
fink mailing lists about postgres, so perhaps someone out there is 
using the combination and can help.  I'd be willing to experiment, but 
will have learning curve and time management issues, especially as the 
new term begins.

In short, I'm sorry to hear you're having problems, but I think it 
should be clear to other people that these problems seem to be specific 
to the integration of GRASS and external database systems, not to the 
GRASS system as a whole.

Cheers,
Scott
------
Scott W. Mitchell		Scott_Mitchell AT carleton.ca
Department of Geography and Environmental Studies
Carleton University, B349 Loeb Building
Ottawa, ON Canada


There have been a FEW posts on this recently, I think it all started 
with:

On Wednesday, Sep 3, 2003, at 01:01 Canada/Eastern, Multiple recipients 
of list wrote:

>> On Tue, 2003-09-02 at 09:23, Bill Dickinson Jr wrote:
>>>  Hey there:
>>>
>>>  I have been running in circles for about 2 months now trying to get
>>>  GRASS installed on my OS X box and have yet to get it successfully
>>>  running. If there is someone out there who has successfully 
>>> installed
>>>  and is currently running GRASS on their Mac, and would have the time
>>  > to talk me through yet another installation attempt, I would
>>>  appreciate the assist. My "friends" keep telling me to stop beating
>>>  my head against the OS X wall and simply use a Linux box, but being 
>>> a
>>>  Mac-fanatic I would really like to have it working on my Mac. ;-)
>>>
>>>  Thanks.
>>>
>>>  Bill
>> --