Hello,

Saying your question is naive is linguistically distinct from saying
you are naive. I've never met you so I could not possibly know if you
are or are not. Besides, I'm generally partial to the surveyors whose
paths I've had a chance to cross (or rod to carry) so I'd be inclined
to think highly of any new surveyor I came across.

No, I don't have any need to insult you. Your discussion frustrates me
intensely because it is undirected, open ended, unresolvable and, yes,
naive. You apparently have some ill defined aim to help some amorphous
98% of folk with their "common" problems whatever they may be. Also
you seem to suspect that there is some easy way to solve their needs.
Neither ring true but more power to you if you are right and can get
that done! That's honest. I'd love to have their needs met by some
simple library. Work with OpenJUMP or fork Geotools 2.4 if those can
help you---the code is there for your taking! Build or participate in
a great community and have fun the whole time. Or join Geotools trunk
and do whatever work you feel like.

For my part, I don't believe that a real GIS library can be simple.
The truism in the Gnumeric project has always been that everyone uses
about 20% of Excel---the same core 10% and then a totally different
set of functionality for the rest of their use. So we still needed to
support 100% of Excel plus, because we were motivated by being serious
mathematically, we had to build a whole new set of mathematically
correct spreadsheet functions. It's been a big, long term undertaking
merely to do some calculations with well defined data types. For GIS,
I'm certain it's going to be a much longer and harder road just to
build the underlying library. I'm certain that you can't do anything
without mathematically rigourous referencing. I'm also certain that
you can't do good work on questions with large geographic extents if
you don't have a complete handle on the closed manifold. I have a
similar take on each part right through the whole stack: rigiour is
needed for any robust, correct work with features, real coverages,
analytic systems and graphical output. So that's my orbital path which
motivates my work and my answers.


I'm signing off from this conversation; it has taken too much of my
time already and I don't see it going anywhere productive. Best of
luck to you,

--adrian

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