[GRASSLIST:6037] Re: problems with grass6beta2 and R

[Pete Lancashire]

Roger,

I found your reply in my SPAM filter that I was cleaning out
Sunday. The rules have been fixed.

I'll dig up the example I was going to work on.

Please don't take my comment as to being frustrated the wrong
way. It was not a complaint on the extensive work that has been
volunteered, but on communication and coordination between groups.

The sandbox is a great idea, and a tool all projects should use.

Again, sorry for not responding sooner

-pete "One ERSI and Oracle License can buy you ...." 

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 00:12, Roger Bivand wrote:
> I'm forwarding to the list my off-list reply to Pete Lancashire, to which
> he has not had the courtesy to respond, in particular to my offer (at foot
> of message) to interact with him in trying to find a resolution to his
> immediate needs. The only response was to post a *bug* report on the known
> fact that the GRASS5.* interface to R doesn't work in compiled mode with
> GRASS6 - reports indicate that it seems to work in interpreted mode for 
> raster layers.
> 
> I will be establishing a sourceforge sandbox to publish ideas (see
> discussion below), and am grateful to Paolo Cavallini and Miha Staut for
> their ideas so far. I will post the address when ready.
> 
> Roger Bivand
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2005 21:46:24 +0100 (CET)
> From: Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no>
> To: Pete Lancashire <list at pdxeng.com>
> Subject: Re: [GRASSLIST:5891] Re: problems with grass6beta2 and R
> 
> Pete:
> 
> On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, Pete Lancashire wrote:
> 
> > I just want to add a voice to this.
> > 
> > I'm trying to 'promote' the use of OSS withing a
> > very conservative industry and am putting together
> > a demo that includes Grass with PostGIS and R.
> > 
> > Doing a demo with Grass with R would have been a 90%
> > winner. And believe that if successful development
> > money could surface.
> > 
> > I would hope that in the future the Grass dev. team
> > take into consideration input from other projects
> > that are helping make Grass a valid alternative.
> > Saying that, I do want to add my greatest admiration
> > for the project so far.
> > 
> > My only recourse is to "down grade" to 5.4, but that
> > will then kill some of the other demo's.
> > 
> 
> The interface was just for rasters in 2D, and was extended to sites. The 
> problem that has occurred is because a very quick decision was made to 
> alter a fundamental file structure for 6.0, a file structure that has been 
> fixed essentially since GRASS began. If I change the current interface, 
> which works for most users, their work will be broken. 6.0 is not yet 
> released, and is a fast moving codebase, which is by definition hard to 
> interface to. 
> 
> My repeated requests to the list for advice and help from 
> people who actually use 6.0.0beta* has yielded a two-line script using 
> system() in R - which could be elaborated for handling vectorised sites, 
> and an offer to try out anything I happen to write. But *no* offers of 
> code or working examples of loose coupling (writing the GRASS vector 
> layer(s) to file as a shapefile or e00, reading into R, writing from R as 
> a file, importing into GRASS). 
> 
> We also have rgdal as the GDAL bindings for R, and it is quite possible
> that alpha code for OGR could get to where you need to be. But that isn't
> what you are putting on the table, is it? 
> 
> (At least part of the problem is that GRASS6 vector also involves using
> (as you include below) various databases, which R can talk to directly -
> so the R/GRASS interface remains just R/GRASS for raster, but potentially
> becomes R/(GRASS hands off a driver to) many different databases -
> designing for this could potentially drop GRASS and just go to the
> databases, or even reverse roles and embed the R engine inside GRASS or
> the database. I suspect that this includes so many local variants that 
> the vector interface will have to be loose-coupled, or tightly 
> customised with the database drivers; R could also be embedded elsewhere 
> I think, depending on the distribution of tasks and which process is "in 
> charge" - now R runs on top of GRASS with the user using the R 
> interface, but with embedding, this can be done differently - see:
> http://www.est.ufpr.br/myR/ for an example. See also: 
> http://www.math.uni-klu.ac.at/~agebhard/preDSC2003.pdf).
> 
> > -pete "A frustrated at times OSS Promoter"
> 
> Well, just imagine how frustrated volunteer overtime developers and 
> especially maintainers feel! You add new fun stuff and get current users 
> all over you very quickly!
> 
> > 
> > P.S. Demo would have included Grass6, R, GDAL, PostGIS,
> > MySQL, data exchange with Oracle 10g, PHP, Perl, Apache,
> > and a Beowulf Clusters.
> > 
> 
> Please describe in detail what needs to be passed between GRASS and R, and 
> how much time you can give me to try it out - you have the examples, I 
> don't - and I'll try and give you some pointers and R scripts. Please 
> also state the version of your platform and at least GRASS, GDAL, and 
> R. The GRASS interface (note 5.0!) began that way. If it's simple enough - 
> write a shapefile from GRASS, read a shapefile into R, do stuff, write 
> shapefile or raster (Arc ASCII GRID works anyway) or whatever with new 
> stuff, read into GRASS, it's doable.
> 
> Roger
> 
> > 
> > 
> > On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 10:39, Roger Bivand wrote:
> > > On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Carlos Henrique Grohmann wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Hello all,
> > > > 
> > > > is there anything wrong about grass6 and R?
> > > 
> > > This has now been raised many times. The GRASS/R interface was broken by 
> > > the imposition of 3D windows in GRASS 6 (and sites have gone away too). It 
> > > is reported to work with the interp= argument set to TRUE, that is, not 
> > > using the compiled interface, but exchanging text files. Please note the 
> > > full title of the GRASS package in R: "Interface between GRASS 5.0 
> > > geographical information system and R" - in fact 5.4 still works as 
> > > designed, but 6.0 does not. 
> > > 
> > > I am open to offers of help to rectify this, and suggested doing this on
> > > sourceforge so that others can contribute.  Many users depend on GRASS 5
> > > and the interface, so the current structure must be maintained;
> > > development of a 6.0 version can be done, but needs contributions from
> > > people actually using 6.0 and willing to help replace the sites functions
> > > and write vector functions.
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > > I tried to run it today and look what I get:
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > > library(GRASS)
> > > > GRASS environment variables in: /tmp/grass6-guano-5178/gisrc
> > > > > G<-gmeta()
> > > > Error in gmeta() : Bad or no region for current mapset
> > > > >
> > > > 
> > > > I installed the R GRASS package with:
> > > > > R CMD INSTALL --configure-args=--grass5=/usr/local/bin/grass60
> > > > GRASS_0.2-23.tar.gz
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > The "--configure-args=--grass5=/usr/local/bin/grass60" have been 
> > > redundant for about three years, by the way, because the package contains 
> > > copies of GRASS library source files for 5.* raster and sites access, and 
> > > so does *not* link to binary libraries (this was a problem on cygwin at 
> > > the time).
> > > 
> > > Roger Bivand
> > > 
> > > 
> > > > any ideas?
> > > > 
> > > > thanks
> > > > 
> > > > +----------------------------------------------------------+
> > > >           Carlos Henrique Grohmann - Guano  
> > > >    Geologist M.Sc - Doctorate Student at IGc-USP - Brazil
> > > >         Linux User #89721  - guano at usp dot br
> > > > +----------------------------------------------------------+
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > 
> >