[GRASSLIST:7502] Re: First reactions

[Hamish]

> > I find it easier to run GRASS within Linux (on a Linux only
> > computer) and that is the setup I am using. Most of our users,
> > however, would not want to deal with Linux.
> 
> I totally agree! 
> Installing GRASS on linux is quit easy, but for Windows an *.exe file
> is  missing. I am not familiar with the software-build problems, but
> as far as I  am aware of it, it is a license problem. Somebody has to
> pursue the exe-build  program. Please correct me if I am wrong.

No license problem. All the major cross platform GUI toolkits have free
software implementations: TclTk (what GRASS uses); Motif (GRASS's
xanim); gtk+ (wasn't someone working on a gtk frontend?); Java (jGRASS);
wxWidgets (no GRASS port AFAIK); and the latest release of QT (QGIS).

A GPL version of QT for Windows is the new change.


I believe the reason GRASS uses Tcl/Tk is that it was the best (or maybe
only) choice at the time. With the advent of the --interface-description
command line option and the r.* v.* breakdown, automatically generating
a GUI menu for each of the modules should be fairly straight forward
exercise. Then "all" that someone needs to do is the frontend.


But GRASS does require a UNIX environment to run in, so it has to use
something like Cygwin to provide that, along with all the complexity
that entails.



Hamish