[GRASSLIST:3359] Allowing multiple users to access a mapset

[Peggy Norquist]

Hello,

We have a script that starts GRASS for a given location, mapset, and
map, and runs r.profile to find the altitude for a given point.  
We would like to allow any user on our system to run the script on a
particular map (non-concurrently).  But we've run into problems when 
a user that doesn't own the mapset tries to read from it.  Does this
mapset 
have to be the PERMANENT mapset?  Only the owner/admin will be modifying

the map, everyone else would only read from it (assuming that r.profile 
only requires reading; is this true?).     

We've found some old GRASSlist messages about creating a new mapset
within
the location for each user, but it's not entirely clear to us how to go 
about it--what has to be in place for a non-owner to be able to read
from
a mapset.  Also, it looks like some people have tried to get around the
ownership issue by disabling the uid checks in G_mapset_permissions.
 
We would appreciate any help that anyone could give us.        


Also there is a question about buffer checking:
    From gisbase.c (admittedly in an old version):

      char msg[100];

      sprintf(msg,_("MAPSET %s - permission denied"), mapset);

  Do you know what the _() around the format string does?  Does this
  help with bounds checking?

One last question--
Since we are using only a small part of the GRASS functionality, is
there
some way for us to pare down our GRASS installation so it contains only
the commands we use, and takes up less space?

Thank you,
Peggy Norquist