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• GRASS Programming Howto (partially outdated)
• Scripting tips
• 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
• Large File Support (LFS) implementation

Debugging

• GRASS Debugging

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.

GRASS Makefile writing

PGM must be set before including Module.make.

In general, the point at which variables get defined doesn't matter if they are only used in commands, but it matters if they are used in the dependency line. Essentially, dependency lines get expanded at the point they are read, while commands are expanded at the point they are executed.

The list of variables where the order is significant is:

       PGM
       LIB_NAME
       SUBDIRS
       CMD_OBJS
       LIB_OBJS
       LOCAL_HEADERS
       EXTRA_HEADERS
       DEPENDENCIES

SVN/CVS

• New SVN instructions
• Old CVS server help page
• Live GRASS TracBrowser and ViewCVS browseable web interface to the source code repository
• Hints for Working with CVS
• SVN commit mailing list archive

SVN

• Migration from CVS to SVN notes

• Most notes on the Working with CVS page are relevant.

gradually adapt that page

GIT

• Some experiments with GRASS managed in GIT repository

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 ideas (new ideas)

Works in Progress

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

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