The Office of GRASS Integration is happy to announce the official release of
GRASS 4.1. Many bugs have been fixed since the GRASS 4.1beta release, as well
as some reorganization, and healthy modifications to the Users' and
Programmers' manuals.
The release has been placed in its entirety and tested on moon.cecer.army.mil,
available via Anonymous FTP. If anyone would like info on FTP and receiving
the release from the moon, feel free to send mail at any time to
grass-ftp-admin@moon.cecer.army.mil .
The GRASS 4.1 sources are available in
/grass/grass4.1/release/source
and are in the form of a 15-megabyte cpio archive split into 1-megabyte chunks
for ease of acquisition. Related sources (interfaces from GRASS to other
software systems, i.e. src.related) are in
/grass/grass4.1/release/related
The spearfish database and other data are also placed on the site (see the
README file in the release directory for details and locations of the data.)
Documentation for the GRASS 4.1 release is available in
grass/grass4.1/documents
This includes the GRASS 4.1 Installation Guide, which is a crucial aid in
compiling GRASS. If you plan to compile and install GRASS, this guide is
essential. Also included are the GRASS 4.1 Users' Reference and
Programmer's Manuals. These manuals are available in both Postscript and
troff source formats. The README files in the documents directory and
subdirectories explain the process of obtaining and printing all of the
available GRASS 4.1 documentation.
Because some sites lack the expertise or desire to compile GRASS, and some
operating systems are "unbundling" their C compilers, we have made available
a "ready to run" version of the GRASS 4.1 release for Sun Sparc (sun4)
architectures. This package includes only the programs in src and src.alpha
(which for GRASS 4.1 includes xgrass). The binary release is linked against
static libraries, so the resultant programs should work with any version of
SunOS4.x.x. However, they are also much larger than they would be if you
compiled them yourself.
The binary release is available in /grass/grass4.1/release/binary, and
consists of 71 1-megabyte chunks of a tar archive. Please note that OGI at
this time is only testing the binary release process: while we will be glad
to hear suggestions about the binary release, we do not have the manpower to
provide more than superficial support for the binary distribution. It is
anticipated that the expertise in the GRASS user community, through the GRASS
mailing lists and newsgroups, will make itself available to solve many of the
problems users may encounter with the binary release. Any bugs in the GRASS
software itself should be reported via "bug.report.sh" as usual.
If there are any questions, please let us know. Questions and problems with
the ftp-site should be directed to
grass-ftp-admin@moon.cecer.army.mil
Enjoy GRASS 4.1!
Sincerely,
The Office of GRASS Integration
United States Army Corps of Engineers
Construction Engineering Research Laboratories,
Champaign, Illinois