On Thu, 14 Jan 2010, Paolo Cavallini wrote:

Hi all.
Reading the recent post of Glynn:

Right now, I'm actively trying to think of ways to make life harder for anyone 
trying
to use the GRASS libraries for anything except GRASS modules.
http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/869#comment:1

I wonder if this is somehow a view shared by GRASS-PSC, and I ask myself what 
would
be the advantage of having GRASS as an isolate piece of software.
I would greatly appreciate devs opinions on this.

Well, Glynn's comment is clearly (as I see it anyway!) meant to be light-hearted/sarcastic. But it has some basis. The idea is not that GRASS should not be used be other projects, but we encourage other projects to use it by running GRASS modules - not by linking against the GRASS internal libraries directly. In the past few years a massive amount of work has gone into making the GRASS modules more Unix-like (do one thing simply and do it well, with no interactivity) - and while this annoyed me a bit for a while, I think it has opened up so many more opportunities for use of GRASS modules as a backend to other systems (e.g. the GRASS GUI) that it is a very good thing.

So, I feel the idea behind Glynn's comments (and one that I guess I would agree with) is that we encourage other projects to use GRASS by calling the modules directly. As GRASS has so few developers compared to the massive body of code, putting in extra development time to make GRASS work in ways that have no benefit for GRASS is just too much effort.

Best regards

Paul
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