[GRASSLIST:4265] Re: Releasing GRASS modules

[Benjamin Ducke]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:18:22 +0100 (BST)
Paul Kelly <paul-grass at stjohnspoint.co.uk> wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Benjamin Ducke wrote:
> 
> > I would like to release some GPL'd GRASS 5.3 modules
> > for spatial predictvie modelling into
> > the GRASS community. My questions are:
> >
> > 1. is there a way to set up a Gmakefile so that HTML
> >  manpages are merged into the GRASS documentation index?
> >  The way it is right now, the HTML pages get copied into
> >  the user's documentation/html directory, but there are
> >  no links from the main index.html file so that the user
> >  is left to point his webbrowser to the files explicitly.
> 
> No; this index is just maintained manually. Note that all the files in the 
> html/html directory are converted into man pages during compilation so 
> that you can read them with g.manual. This isn't done for 5.7 (although I
> wish it was), which just has html pages.

OK, so I take it there is no way to merge documentation automatically
for external modules in 5.3.

> 
> > 2. once other people have tried and tested the modules
> >  and find them useful, is it possible to include them
> >  into the 5.3 CVS, so that people will not have to
> >  download the source from my homepage and have to install
> >  separately?
> 
> There will be no new modules in the 5.3 CVS before the 5.4.0 release. Do 
> the modules use any special features of 5.3 that mean they can't be used 
> directly or easily ported to 5.7?

I make use of the site data format for representing the locations of known
objects. It should not be too much work to convert that to vector points
for 5.7 but I will have to find some time to do it.
Does 5.7 still include the site full sites API?

> 
> Perhaps if things drag on for a long time, after the 5.4.0 release the
> modules could be added to the '5.5 CVS', but CVS write access to that is
> going to be closed so you would not be able to commit bugfixes. Better to
> add them to 5.7 I think.

I guess so. In the meantime I might set up a homepage of my own to distribute
my code. In the meantim, if anyone here is really interested in it, contact me 
and I will send it to you via email.

Benjamin