WinGRASS 6 Current Status

This page describes the current status of winGRASS development. Precompiled winGRASS/Cygwin packages are available here, native winGRASS packages are here.

Compilation

(based on work from Paul Kelly - his message)

Mostly on compiling the accompanying libraries GRASS absolutely needs: XDR, Zlib, libpng, PROJ.4, GDAL.

They are available in a gzipped tar file in case anybody would like to get started quickly: http://www.stjohnspoint.co.uk/grass/ (get wingrass-extralibs.tar.gz). In this case you would just need Msys, Mingw with bison and flex. The prefix where you untar that file you will need to supply to the GRASS configure as:

     --with-includes=prefix --with-libs=prefix

Before compilation, you need to set your path in msys in order to add the path to the lib/ and bin/ directories of Paul's tarball before compiling. You might also need to edit the first few lines of the gdal-config script in the bin/ directory, to reflect the path where it is actually installed.

You also have to erase $(MANDIR) $(MANPAGES) from line 13 of man/Makefile, i.e. 'default: $(MANDIR) $(MANPAGES)' -> 'default:'.

If you get an error such as 'cannot open file `/msys/share/bison/m4sugar/m4sugar.m4': No such file or directory', one solution is to move around the msys bison installation a bit, so that m4sugar.m4 is available in the indicated path.

A working configure line is:

     ./configure --prefix=c:/grass --bindir=c:/grass/bin \
     --with-includes=/c/grass/forgrass/include \
     --with-libs=/c/grass/forgrass/lib --with-cxx --without-jpeg --without-tiff \
     --without-postgres --with-opengl=windows --without-fftw --without-x \
     --enable-x11=no --enable-shared=yes --with-tcltk-includes=/c/tcl/include \
     --with-tcltk-libs=/c/tcl/bin

After compiling you should copy libxdr.dll, libproj.dll, libpng.dll, libgdal-1.dll and libz.dll.1.2.3 into the GRASS lib directory and all the GDAL and PROJ .exe files in the bin directory into the GRASS bin directory, and then you have a more or less self-contained GRASS distribution.

You can also install Activestate Tcl/Tk 8.4.13 (in c:\tcl).

What is missing?

Vector

• v.digit: implement as pure tcl (Glynn)
• Vector-DB connection:
  • This has been solved for now by compiling XDRlib as a static library
  • M Lennert: I had hoped that Radim's patch for dbmi_client (http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/2006-December/028118.html) might solve the issue I've had with the db protocol errors, but apparently this is not the case. When I push the 'show the attribute columns' in a vector panel, I still get

 *******
 Displaying column types/names for database connection of layer 1:
 dbmi: Protocol error
 Cannot open table <streams>
 ********

 and a 'v.db.select' on the same map gives me:

 ********
 'vector/streams' was found in more mapsets (also found in user1).
 dbmi: Protocol error

 Cannot open select cursor
 *********

• P Kelly: I can confirm similar problems. I tried to import a Shapefile with v.in.ogr. I went quite deep into debugging it and got nowhere at all, although I should have taken better notes. I did confirm though that compiling the library with -mwindows as Radim suggested on the list made no difference either. I think trying with a different database, PostgreSQL perhaps is the next big step to debugging this. See if the behaviour is the same as with dbf and if not we can isolate it a bit more.
• Moritz: followup on DB issue: ... using db.select as the test case, the error seems to happen around a call to xdr_int() in lib/db/dbmi_base/xdrstring.c....
• Moritz: followup 2 on DB issue
• Moritz: followup 3 on DB issue
• Paul: followup 4 on DB issue
• Glynn: followup 5 on DB issue
• Glynn: followup 6 on DB issue

Display

• Display drivers: socket
  • Use gis.m instead of monitors.
  • Make gis.m Output window more like xterm. No need to hit Run.
  • Is there any way that the Map Display in gis.m can interact with console commands? IPC? File Alteration Monitor?

Imagery

• i.class: SIGALRM, SIGTSTP (are these signals important?)
• wait() in:
  • i.ortho.photo/photo.2image: wait()
  • i.ortho.photo/photo.2target: wait()
  • i.points: wait()
  • i.vpoints: wait()
  • Note: also in lib/gis/popen.c and lib/gis/system.c (use those implementations?)

Raster

• r.terraflow: getrusage()
  • check this octave patch email thread (check thread msgs)

Known problems

• metacharacter escape in "sh -c '$cmd'"
• modules not working: r.proj (v.proj too?), r.surf.rst, v.neighbors, v.kernel, r.cost
• Cannot open Help pages.
• Have to add c:\mingw\bin to PATH on some systems.
  • You should have typed c:/mingw instead of c:\mingw when asked by the MinGW installer.
• Have to type "exit" in the console to save ~/.grassrc file. Then, close gis.m to finish the session.
• A previous installation of grass under cygwin is likely to cause problems with WinGrass. Follow the directions to remove cygwin at http://cygwin.com/faq/faq-nochunks.html#faq.setup.uninstall-all

The following items cannot be fixed in the near future:

• Cannot display a thematic layer.
  • d.vect.thematic requires PNG driver, which is not available in winGRASS.
  • can't read "_data(.gronsole.gronsole,4,donecmd)": no such element in array error
  • Aqua TclTk solution: http://intevation.de/rt/webrt?serial_num=5096&display=History

TclTk issues

• cannot run shell scripts: only .com, .exe, .bat
  • sh -c '$cmd'
• var=val style argument is not valid for batch files: equal sign is a separator like a space. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=71247 http://www.gatago.com/alt/msdos/batch/17358926.html
  • need .exe wrapper for shell scripts? grass-xterm-wrapper.exe
  • We now have .bat wrappers for each shell script, which run the shell specified by the GRASS_SH environment variable and pass the full path to the script to it
• file command returns bad code (catch is needed): http://sources.redhat.com/ml/insight/2003-q1/msg00079.html
  • catch {file copy}
  • catch {file delete}
  • catch {file rename -force} does not work. Delete old file first: catch {file delete}; catch {file rename}
• file redirection (>@stdout, 2>@stderr) does not work: http://wiki.tcl.tk/672
  • Worked around by using a small C-program (grocat.exe) to combine stdout and stderr
  • exec a batch file doing redirection (>&2, 2>&1)
• no -permissions file attributes
  • catch {file attributes -permissions}

Other libraries

GDAL

• lib/gis/OBJ.*/fmode.o is needed for any GRASS related modules.
• modified ltmain.sh to install binary files from wrapper scripts.