[GRASS5] Proposal to deprecate

Hi all,

I would like to suggest that support for the dig(vector) version 3.0,
left over from GRASS 3.x, be now deprecated. ie. we agree that it should
be removed at some point in the future, say for the next major release.

It seems unlikely that many people will be using GRASS 3, though there
may be maps still around. The portability machinery in place is perhaps
more involved than is really justified at this stage and it makes
further development difficult, as we are now trying to move on to
improve dig v5 while remaining compatible with v4 (it's a pain trying to
keep v3 going as well).

Any comments welcome.

David

PS. An afterthought - is it already deprecated?

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On Sun, 1 Oct 2000, David D Gray wrote:

I would like to suggest that support for the dig(vector) version 3.0,
left over from GRASS 3.x, be now deprecated. ie. we agree that it should
be removed at some point in the future, say for the next major release.

  Seems reasonable to me, David.

Rich

Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President

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David,
is it possible to maintain a conversion programm/script of some sort,
which can only upgrade v3 format files to v5?

I do not know much about who uses this, so I cannot tell if it can be
removed.
  Bernhard

On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 09:57:39PM +0000, David D Gray wrote:

I would like to suggest that support for the dig(vector) version 3.0,
left over from GRASS 3.x, be now deprecated. ie. we agree that it should
be removed at some point in the future, say for the next major release.

It seems unlikely that many people will be using GRASS 3, though there
may be maps still around. The portability machinery in place is perhaps
more involved than is really justified at this stage and it makes
further development difficult, as we are now trying to move on to
improve dig v5 while remaining compatible with v4 (it's a pain trying to
keep v3 going as well).

Any comments welcome.

David

PS. An afterthought - is it already deprecated?

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Bernhard Reiter wrote:

David,
is it possible to maintain a conversion programm/script of some sort,
which can only upgrade v3 format files to v5?

Bernhard

It would be v3 <-> v6 because if we announce dropping support for V3 dig
files now, it would not be implemented till at least v6, ie. 1 full
major release cycle. Meanwhile, v3 files are still processed
transparently. But yes, a module for conversion of any GRASS3 format
files would be developed so that existing data would still be
compatible.

The problem is that the design of the version portability code makes it
difficult to maintain portability across more than two versions
simultaneously.

So this is really just a policy decision at the moment and does not
require any action in the near future, but if we are to make this change
at some time in the future it is perhaps best to give notice through a
formal announcement of deprecation.

I do not know much about who uses this, so I cannot tell if it can be
removed.
        Bernhard

No, I don't know either. I can only think that there might be legacy
databases that are in v3 format but may be accessed by more recent GRASS
releases.

On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 09:57:39PM +0000, David D Gray wrote:
> I would like to suggest that support for the dig(vector) version 3.0,
> left over from GRASS 3.x, be now deprecated. ie. we agree that it should
> be removed at some point in the future, say for the next major release.
>
> It seems unlikely that many people will be using GRASS 3, though there
> may be maps still around. The portability machinery in place is perhaps
> more involved than is really justified at this stage and it makes
> further development difficult, as we are now trying to move on to
> improve dig v5 while remaining compatible with v4 (it's a pain trying to
> keep v3 going as well).
>
> Any comments welcome.
>
> David
>
>
> PS. An afterthought - is it already deprecated?
>
> ----------------------------------------
> If you want to unsubscribe from GRASS Development Team mailing list write to:
> minordomo@geog.uni-hannover.de with
> subject 'unsubscribe grass5'

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Association for a Free Informational Infrastructure (ffii.org)

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On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 05:40:09PM +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

David,
is it possible to maintain a conversion programm/script of some sort,
which can only upgrade v3 format files to v5?

I do not know much about who uses this, so I cannot tell if it can be
removed.
  Bernhard

Hi Bernhard and David,

*if required*, such a converter should be sufficient. I am working
with GRASS for many years now and never had any dataset in dig3
format. Maybe we can ask the <grasslist@baylor.edu> if anyone is
still interested in dig3, but I think (hope) that it is history.

Just my 0.02 Euro

Markus

On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 09:57:39PM +0000, David D Gray wrote:
> I would like to suggest that support for the dig(vector) version 3.0,
> left over from GRASS 3.x, be now deprecated. ie. we agree that it should
> be removed at some point in the future, say for the next major release.
>
> It seems unlikely that many people will be using GRASS 3, though there
> may be maps still around. The portability machinery in place is perhaps
> more involved than is really justified at this stage and it makes
> further development difficult, as we are now trying to move on to
> improve dig v5 while remaining compatible with v4 (it's a pain trying to
> keep v3 going as well).
>
> Any comments welcome.
>
> David
>
>
> PS. An afterthought - is it already deprecated?

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It is always good to keep compatibility.
But is can be done by a seperate conversion script.
We only need to provide one conversion path for each data file version,
so no need to make a real intelligent conversion file suite.

  Bernhard

On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 07:13:06PM +0000, David D Gray wrote:

Bernhard Reiter wrote:

> is it possible to maintain a conversion programm/script of some sort,
> which can only upgrade v3 format files to v5?

It would be v3 <-> v6

The problem is that the design of the version portability code makes it
difficult to maintain portability across more than two versions
simultaneously.

On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 08:55:33AM +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:

On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 05:40:09PM +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

*if required*, such a converter should be sufficient. I am working
with GRASS for many years now and never had any dataset in dig3
format. Maybe we can ask the <grasslist@baylor.edu> if anyone is
still interested in dig3, but I think (hope) that it is history.

--
Professional Service around Free Software (intevation.net)
The FreeGIS Project (freegis.org)
Association for a Free Informational Infrastructure (ffii.org)