WinGRASS 6 Current Status

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Revision as of 11:54, 19 November 2007 by Neteler (talk | contribs) (cosmetics)
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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

+ Moritz: followup X on DB issue (now looks good!)

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()

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:

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.