On Mar 3, 2008, at 8:53 AM, Dylan Beaudette wrote:
I see quite a bit of disconnect between the GUI development and core GRASS development (I am not helping this either). It would be a good idea to spend some careful thought, with lots of input from everyone involved to nail down the general plan for GRASS 7. I can see a lot of potential for hurt feelings (= lost developers) if a slow and methodic approach is not taken. Cheers, Dylan
Actually, I don't think that there is that much of a disconnect. There is a lot of communication between the folks writing a lot of the C- code and those of us working on the GUI. I think we're all lurching along in more or less the same general direction. But it's a very big and very complicated project and coordination can always be improved. Regular discussions about new display architecture and the move away from C-modules with hard-coded interactivity limited to an aging xmon interface have been going on for nearly 2 years.
The whole impetus for the current TclTk GUI was to demonstrate that we could have an interactive display architecture that did not need to rely on interactive d.* modules in which it was hard-coded--and to provide an environment which could encourage C programmers to expand modules to work better with this approach. This has been largely successful especially because of good coordination between GUI development and core C-module development. The current Windows native version of GRASS would not have been possible without this work.
The move toward Python as a scripting platform seems very exciting for GUI development, but even more so for expanded core functionality. After working with it for a year and a half, I'm sold. We are slowly beginning to switch our scripting in my lab from bash to Python--with much better and easier to read and maintain code. The python GUI also has opened a lot of new possibilities that I think many will benefit from (e.g., the new attribute data management modules).
We need to keep talking about this and issues like 'where' to put different functions in the new architecture. Sometimes it's clear, but other times it's fuzzy. I hope I haven't hurt anyone's feelings. Mine are OK.
Michael _______________________________________________ grass-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev
