[GRASS-dev] Let's enrich the demolocation with a country borders map

neteler · June 15, 2013, 11:30am

Hi,

esp. for Windows users the demolocation should be copied into a/the
grassdata directory (I think there is still a bug there which prevents
the installer from setting up things as ready-for-use: it is bad to
not have [win]GRASS usable out of the box).

Since the demolocation does not contain anything interesting, I have
locally prepared a copy of
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/110m-cultural-vectors/

Size:
[neteler@oboe demolocation]$ ls -la PERMANENT/sqlite
-rw-r--r--. 1 neteler gis 36864 Jun 15 12:59 sqlite.db

[neteler@oboe demolocation]$ ls -lart PERMANENT/vector/country_boundaries
-rw-r--r--. 1 neteler gis 53741 May 26 14:29 topo
-rw-r--r--. 1 neteler gis 178613 May 26 14:29 sidx
-rw-r--r--. 1 neteler gis 153289 May 26 14:29 coor
-rw-r--r--. 1 neteler gis 21277 May 26 14:29 cidx
-rw-r--r--. 1 neteler gis 296 May 26 14:30 head
-rw-r--r--. 1 neteler gis 829 Jun 15 12:59 hist
-rw-r--r--. 1 neteler gis 113 Jun 15 12:59 dbln

"Terms of Use
All versions of Natural Earth raster + vector map data found on this
website are in the public domain."
See http://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/

In essence, the GRASS 7 users should be presented after the
installation with a simple, prepopulated demolocation. The space
consumption is small and the value to show newbies how to get into
GRASS high.

Opinions?

Markus

Hamish · June 15, 2013, 11:45am

Markus Neteler wrote:

esp. for Windows users the demolocation should be copied
into a/the grassdata directory (I think there is still a bug
there which prevents the installer from setting up things as
ready-for-use: it is bad to not have [win]GRASS usable out of
the box).

I'm not sure about grass7, but startup using the demolocation
on WinGrass 6.4svn and 6.5 is working fine. Of course it's
empty, but at least it runs.

Since the demolocation does not contain anything interesting,

I am happy for a minimal demolocation to ship with WinGRASS*,
but if we do that we should take what "demolocation" is now and
rename it "dummylocation" or so for the build scripts.

[*] a true demo location is probably of limited use with linux
distro packages since the end-user won't have write permission
to create their own mapset in the default paths. e.g. in debian
it would end up in /usr/share/doc/grass/examples/ and need to
be copied to $HOME by hand by interested users.

I have locally prepared a copy of
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/110m-cultural-vectors/

great

Content:
v.info -c country_boundaries
Displaying column types/names for database connection of
layer <1>:

...

perhaps we could drop some of the the hardly-used columns and
make it even smaller?

thanks,
Hamish