[GRASS-user] Trouble getting started

[Tom Trebisky]

I see.  Well I have done my share of Gtk programming in C and via Ruby 
and I remember things of this sort (messages that were difficult or 
impossible to relate to code), especially when callbacks are 
registered.   I presume (or get the impression) that you are a developer 
and not just an end user of Grass.

I find myself half tempted to clone the Git repository and try to build 
Grass from sources, but this is not why I got involved here. And I am 
sure better minds than mine have already looked at this issue.

I might presume/guess that this has been identified as an upstream issue 
in the Python/Gtk bindings or perhaps even in Gtk itself -- and there 
may be better things to work on than chasing this in hopes that the 
teams upstream will do something about all of this.

My interests (with regard to Grass) are in maps and geology and I will 
try to stick to that for now.

Thanks for your friendly reception into the Grass community !!!

     Tom

On 11/15/19 3:26 PM, Markus Neteler wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
> On Fri, Nov 15, 2019 at 5:05 PM Tom Trebisky <tom at mmto.org> wrote:
>> Hi Moritz,
>>
>> Thank you for your help and advice.  I am running 7.8.1RC1 as it turns
>> out, installed yesterday.
>>
>> I was overly alarmed by the error messages (they do say "Critical Error"
>> after all) and along with
>> getting two blank windows, I just assumed that something serious was wrong.
> Yes, these GTK error messages are annoying a big time!
> Seems nobody knows how to get rid of them. See your preferred search
> engine that many software packages with terminal support + GUI suffer
> from them...
>
>> I do think that it would make sense for somebody to fix whatever it is
>> that yields the messages like:
>>
>> (wxgui.py:419): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 21:21:42.695:
>> gtk_box_gadget_distribute: assertion 'size >= 0' failed in GtkSpinButton
> Fully agreed. The thing is that they are rather impossible to debug.
> It says line 419 but there is nothing related.
>
>> In fact I note that the window I used to start GRASS is filled with
>> messages of this sort.
>> Likely that the Gtk libraries have become extra fussy or something, but
>> it would be nice to clean this
>> up as it will alarm new users (or any sensible user I would think).
> Again, fully agreed.
>
>> My blank windows do have buttons and when I ignore the error messages
>> that continue to spew out, I do get
>> results!  I had expected that I would immediately see some kind of map,
>> not just a blank canvas to start, so on
>> with the learning curve I go.
> That's a different topic but also agreed ;-)
>
> Markus