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
- The Software Freedom Law Center's Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects
Resources for Developers
Communication
- You can contact GRASS folks in IRC
- Developer mailing list
Documentation
- GRASS libraries are self-documenting using Doxygen header comments.
- GRASS Programming Howto (partially outdated)
- Scripting tips
- Updating GRASS Documentation How-To
- GIS Concepts and how they are implemented in GRASS
- Large File Support (LFS) implementation
- Eclipse tips how to use the Eclipse IDE for GRASS development
Debugging
Code
- Tracking bugs, patches and feature requests
- GRASS AddOns - User code contributions (custom scripts, modules, icons, etc)
- Compile and Install hints
Code submission procedure
Code submission standards
- C language coding standards
- Shell script coding standards
- Tcl/Tk script coding standards
- Python script coding standards
- Documentation coding standards (manual pages)
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
- Live GRASS TracBrowser and ViewCVS browseable web interface to the source code repository
- Hints for Working with SVN
- SVN commit mailing list archive
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 FEM-CRI (since 2008; from 2005-2007 ITC-irst was the partner))
- SVN-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
Ongoing and Plans
Overview
- Reports:
- 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 Vector TODO
- Vector network analysis ideas (new ideas)
Works in Progress
- Next generation GRASS GUI 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
- 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
- GRASS and ABM
- JGRASS
GRASS and QGIS
- Building QGIS/GRASS Windows Binary On Linux (using MinGW)
- 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
- Essay Writing Help - professional essay writing help.
- Starspan - Mixed raster and vector spatial analysis
- OpenEV - Raster and vector GIS with good support for image analysis