Development

GRASS License

The GRASS GIS project is developed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (the GPL) in the open by volunteers the world over.

• WikiPedia entry discussing the GPL

Resources for Developers

Communication

• You can contact GRASS folks in IRC
• Developers mailing list

Documentation

• GRASS Programming Manual
• GRASS Programming Howto (partially outdated)
• Updating GRASS Documentation How-To

• Doxygen manual

GRASS libraries are self-documenting using Doxygen header comments.

• GIS Concepts and how they are implemented in GRASS
• GRASS Debugging
• Large File Support (LFS) implementation

Code

• Tracking bugs, patches and feature requests
• GRASS AddOns - User code contributions (custom scripts, modules, icons, etc)
• Compile and Install hints

Code submission standards

• C language coding standards
• Shell script coding standards
• Tcl/Tk script coding standards

Explanation of C indentation rules

(see C language coding standards)

-bap	Force blank lines after procedure bodies.
-bbb	Force blank lines before block comments.
-bli1	Indent braces 1 space.
-bls	Put braces on the line after struct declaration lines.
-br	Put braces on line with if, etc.
-cbi0	Indent braces after a case label 0 spaces.
-ci4	Continuation indent of 4 spaces.
-cli0	Case label indent of 0 spaces.
-d0	Set indentation of comments not to the right of code to 0 spaces.
-di0	Put variables in column 0.
-fc1	Format comments in the first column.
-hnl	Prefer to break long lines at the position of newlines in the input.
-i4	Set indentation level to 4 spaces.
-ip4	Indent parameter types in old-style function definitions by 4 spaces.
-l80	Set maximum line length for non-comment lines to 80.
-lc80	Set maximum line length for comment formatting to 80.
-lp	Line up continued lines at parentheses.
-nbad	Do not force blank lines after declarations.
-nbbo	Do not prefer to break long lines before boolean operators.
-nbc	Do not force newlines after commas in declarations.
-ncdb	Do not put comment delimiters on blank lines.
-nce	Do not cuddle } and else.
-ncs	Do not put a space after cast operators.
-nfca	Do not format any comments.
-npcs	Do not put space after the function in function calls.
-nprs	Do not put a space after every '(' and before every ')'.
-npsl	Put the type of a procedure on the same line as its name.
-nsob	Do not swallow optional blank lines.
-pi4	Specify the extra indentation per open parentheses '(' when a statement is broken.
-sbi0	Indent braces of a struct, union or enum 0 spaces.
-sc	Put the `*' character at the left of comments.
-ss	On one-line for and while statments, force a blank before the semicolon.
-ts8	Set tab size to 8 spaces.

CVS

• Main CVS server help page
• Live GRASS WebCVS interface browsable source code repository
• Hints for Working with CVS
• CVS commit mailing list archive

SVN

• Migration from CVS to SVN notes

QA

• Code Quality Control System Mailing list

• Testing GRASS software - a test protocol based on the Spearfish sample data set

• Internal GRASS test suite (scripts collection in "testsuite/")

• External GRASS test suite (TU Berlin)
  • GRASS Test Suite a small test suite for GRASS, the current html output is available here and with memory check here

• External GRASS Quality Assessment and monitoring system (École Polytechnique de Montréal and ITC-irst)

• CVS-commit reports into IRC '#grass' channel via CIA - The open source informant
  • CIA commit bot for realtime monitoring along with grass-commit mailing list (showing the diff's)

Code Search and Metrics

• Google Code Search

• Ohloh Metrics

• Koders Code Search

Ongoing and Plans

Overview

• Reports:
  • GRASS Project Update 2007Q1
• Release Roadmap (old Development Roadmap which needs freshening) - please help with testing release candidates
• GRASS Module Porting List (check here if you don't find a certain command in GRASS 6)
• GRASS ToDo List (overview of GRASS related community projects, see also Release Roadmap)
• GRASS 6-CVS Vector TODO
• Vector network analysis (new ideas)

Works in Progress

• Next generation GRASS GUI development
• Native Windows development
• Message standardization and translation

Sandbox (ideas section)

• GRASS 7 ideas collection
• Image processing
• GRDSS (Geographic Resources Decision Support System)
• Ideas on a replacement raster format specification
• add support (at least storage!) of vertical datum and units
• Discussion on Development Specs for standardized messages
• Discussion on add-on manager repository setup: GEM repository
• Discussion of support for time series in GRASS, e.g. for linking to data and models
• GRASS Location Wizard development
• GRASS Digitizing tool ideas
• Metadata Management ideas
• GRASS Summer of Code ideas

Linking GRASS to external languages

• GRASS-SWIG interface: generic interface to various languages
• GRASS and PHP
• GRASS and Python
• GRASS and Shell: Starting and running GRASS from a script
• Integration of GRASS with JAVA based agent based modeling (ABM)
• JAVAGRASS

GRASS and QGIS

• Building QGIS/GRASS Windows Binary On Linux (using MinGW)
• Adding New Tools to the GRASS Toolbox
• QGIS GRASS Cookbook - Recipes for common tasks

Commercial development for GRASS

This is an unsorted (and most probably incomplete) list of paid development for GRASS GIS

• Comune di Trento (Italy): better vector editing, printing
• ITC-irst:
  • WILMA - Trento Wireless Projekt -> babyGRASS
  • MITRIS traffic-project
  • GRASS 6 vector engine, vector network analysis
• Faunalia, Italy:
  • r.li suite
  • v.in.gpsbabel
  • OGR GRASS vector driver
  • MySQL spatial GRASS connector

• Tekmap Consulting, Canada: NVIZ and many more
• NAVICON CSE, Denmark: GRASS/Qt
• Advanced Computer Systems (ACS), Italy: NVIZ 3D Histograms, Fly-through
• Orkney Inc., Japan: i18N Infrastructure in GRASS 5.0
• Geomodel, Slovakia:
  • r.sun
  • r.flow etc.
• Lockheed Martin LMCO, USA:
  • d.rast.proj
  • d.mon.proj (GRASS 5 contrib)

Related projects

With connections to GRASS

• JGrass - Java based frontend for GRASS incuding extended hydrological modelling tools
• KerGIS - BSD-like licensed fork of GRASS 4.1.5
• GAL - Project to reimplement a GRASS-like GIS using a modern object oriented approach

• pyWPS - Python Web Processing Service (GRASS on the web)
• PROJ.4 - Cartographic Projections Library
• GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
• QGIS - Quantum GIS

• OSGeo- The Open Source Geospatial Foundation
• FreeGIS.org - Interactive information base for the GIS Free Software world
• DebianGIS - Project coordinating geospatial software for Debian GNU/Linux

• R statistics - High powered geostatistical analysis engine
• gstat - Multivariable geostatistical modelling, prediction and simulation

Not connected to GRASS

• GMT - The Generic Mapping Tools advanced cartography package
• SAGA GIS - A modern programming method GIS for the geosciences
• uDig - User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) web portal
• gvSIG - Similar in nature to QGIS, but written in Java
• JUMP - For viewing and manipulating spatial data-sets, using Java
• Starspan - Mixed raster and vector spatial analysis
• OpenEV - Raster and vector GIS with good support for image analysis