[GRASS-user] differences between GDAL Grass built-in support and GDAL-Grass plugin

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 11:46:40PM +0200, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <giohappy at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> A curiosity: why the GDAL-Grass plugin is better then the built-in
> GDAL support for Grass? I came to this question while I was choosing
> wether to compile GDAL with or without Grass support and to use or not
> the GDAL-Grass plugin...

Because building Grass support into GDAL requires that you:
  1) Build GDAL without grass support
  2) Build GRASS
  3) Rebuild GDAL with grass support.

To build GDAL with GRASS support requires GRASS libraries to be built first,
but you can't build GRASS libraries without GDAL being installed first.

With the plugin, you only have to do the build of GDAL once:

  1) Build GDAL without grass support
  2) Build GRASS
  3) Build the plugin.

The plugin isolates the GRASS support more appropriately, and avoids the 
circular dependency.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "It's so simple to be wise: just think of something stupid to say and
  then don't say it."  --- Sam Levinson