GRASS Project Update 2007Q1
This page will be published in the OSGeo Journal Vol. 1, Developer Announcements section
About GRASS GIS
GRASS (the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is a vector and raster GIS, image processing system, graphics production system, and spatial modelling system. It contains many modules for raster and vector data manipulation, rendering images on the monitor or paper, multispectral image geocoding and processing, and attribute management. It is published under the GNU General Public License. GRASS is written in the C language with a prototype GRASS-SWIG interface and further Python based WebGIS applications. The data management capabilities also include 3D raster (voxel) modelling as well as vector network analysis. Through the R interface geostatistical analysis can be performed. GRASS is portable multi-platform software running on Linux, MacOS X, Posix compliant Unixes and MS-Windows (through Cygwin, and major parts now also working natively).
Recent Events
- Italian GRASS and GFOSS Users Meeting - GRASS and GFOSS Users Meeting, Palermo (Italy), 14-16 Feb 2007
- 12 Feb 2007: New GRASS bug and wish tracker - Gforge based
- 10 Feb 2007: GRASS GIS 6.2.1 winGRASS/Cygwin binaries available
- 20 Dec 2006: GRASS GIS / OSGeo Newsletter Published - The first combined GRASS-News / OSGeo-News volume is available
- 12 Dec 2006: GRASS 6.2.1 released - This release fixes several bugs discovered in the 6.2.0 source code
- 31 Oct 2006: GRASS 6.2.0 released - The stable version is published
- 11 August 2006: GRASS 6.1.0 released - this is a technology preview release
- 12 April 2006: Experimental native winGRASS 6 version integrated with QGIS
- 22 Feb 2006: GRASS GIS 6.0.2 released - bugfix release
- Spring 2006: GRASS Quality Assessment (QA) source code navigator online
Under Development
Besides hard testing and bugfixing, several major projects are underway:
- native winGRASS port to be completed
- GRASS GIS 6.3.0 to be published (draft announcement)
- new Python based graphical user interface in progress
- Work related to the OSGeo incubation process (code vetting and addition of missing copyright statements)
Statistics
- In the first three months of 2007, the main server statistics show approximately (there are more than 20 mirror sites, not included here):
- > 5000 GRASS 6.2.1 source code downloads
- > 2000 MS-Windows/Cygwin downloads
- > 1000 Linux downloads
- 11100 Spearfish sample dataset downloads
- grass-users mailing list
- > 800 members
- averaging about 15 messages/day
- grass-dev mailing list
- > 450 members
- averaging about 20 messages/day
- further 12 mailing lists exists plus several national GRASS user lists
- Over the last 8 months, every 1.16 hours a change is committed to the GRASS source code repository (source)
- More useful stats can be found on the Ohloh site: