1. What’s new in a nutshell

As a follow-up to the previous GRASS GIS 7.8.3 we have published the new release GRASS GIS 7.8.4 with more than 170 improvements. This minor release again focuses on wxGUI fixes, especially in the animation export, the layer management, 3D visualization and the data catalogue. Many display modules received fixes as well, and the vector digitizer now works as expected.

The overview of new features in the 7.8 release series is available at new features in GRASS GIS 7.8. See also our detailed announcement with the full list of changes and bugs fixed at https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/7.8.4-News.

Binaries/Installer download:

• winGRASS 7.8.4/standalone: 32bit standalone installer | 64bit standalone installer
• winGRASS 7.8.4/OSGeo4W: 32bit OSGeo4W installer | 64bit OSGeo4W installer
• Mac
• Linux
  • Debian
  • Fedora/Centos/EPEL
  • Ubuntu
  • … further binary packages for other Linux distributions will follow shortly, please check at software downloads

Source code download:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass78/source/
• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass78/source/grass-7.8.4.tar.gz
• To get the GRASS GIS 7.8.4 source code directly from GitHub, see here.

First time users may explore the first steps tutorial after installation.

About GRASS GIS

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics or in the cloud. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

The GRASS Development Team, Oct 2020

The post GRASS GIS 7.8.4 released appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

GRASS GIS 7.8.2 released with updated PROJ 6 and GDAL 3 support

What’s new in a nutshell

As a follow-up to the recent GRASS GIS 7.8.1 we have pusblished the new stable release GRASS GIS 7.8.2.
Besides other improvements, the release contains important PROJ 4/5/6 related datum handling fixes, wxGUI fixes and a fix for the vector import from PostGIS databases.

An overview of the new features in the 7.8 release series is available at new features in GRASS GIS 7.8.

Binaries/Installer download:

• winGRASS 7.8.2: 32bit standalone installer | 64bit standalone installer
• winGRASS 7.8.2 OSGeo4W: 32bit OSGeo4W installer | 64bit OSGeo4W installer
• Debian (forthcoming)
• Fedora and EPEL7 (CentOS7, RHEL7, … – included in Fedora 31+)
• Linux Mint: see Ubuntu
• Ubuntu (ubuntugis-unstable)
• … further binary packages for other Linux distributions will follow shortly, please check at software downloads.
  

Source code download:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass78/source/
• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass78/source/grass-7.8.2.tar.gz
• To get the GRASS GIS 7.8.2 source code directly from GitHub, see here.

See also our detailed announcement:

• https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/7.8.2-News
• https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Grass7/NewFeatures78 (overview of new 7.8 stable release series)
• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass7/manuals/addons/ (list of available addons)

First time users may explore the first steps tutorial after installation.

About GRASS GIS

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

The GRASS Development Team, December 2019

The post GRASS GIS 7.8.2 released appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

GRASS GIS is an open source geoinformation system which is developed by a globally distributed team of developers. Besides the source code developers also message translators, people who write documentation, those who report bugs and wishes and more are involved.

1. Early days… from pre-Internet to CVS and SVN

While GRASS GIS is under development since 1982 (no typo!) it has been put into a centralized source code management system in December 1999. Why so late? Because the World Wide Web (WWW) became available in the 1990s along with tools like browsers and such, followed by the development of distributed source code management tools. We moved on 29th Dec 1999 (think Y2K bug) the entire code into our instance of CVS (Concurrent Versioning System). With OSGeo being founded in 2006, we migrated the CVS repository to SVN (Subversion for the source code management) and trac (bug and wish tracker) on 8 Dec 2007. See here for historic details on our various bug trackers.

2. Time to move on: git

Now, after more than 10 years using SVN/trac time had come to move on and join the large group of projects managing their source code in git (see also our related Wiki page on migration). Git comes with numerous advantages, yet we needed to decide which hosting platform to use. Options where github.com, gitlab.com, gitlab or gitea on OSGeo infrastructure, or other platforms. Through a survey we found out that the preference among contributors is GitHub. While not being open source itself it offers several advantages: it is widely known (good to get new developers interested and involved), numerous OSGeo projects are hosted there under the GitHub “OSGeo organization“.

If all fails (say, one day GitHub no longer being a reasonable choice) the import of our project from GitHub to GitLab is always possible. Indeed, we meanwhile mirror our code on OSGeo’s gitea server.

Relevant script code and migration ticket:

• svn -> git test migration ongoing, see #3722
• svn2git code written by Martin Landa
  • https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/browser/grass-addons/tools/svn2git/
• Martin Landa also forked an existing “trac2github” PHP convertion script which includes GRASS related changes; it is available at https://github.com/landam/trac2github/tree/grass

Relevant steps:

• migrated SVN trunk -> git master
• migrated and tagged release branches (milestones)
• deleted “develbranch6” (we compared it to “releasebranch_6_4” and didn’t discover relevant differences)
• Fix commit messages (yes, we really wanted to be brave, updating decades of commit messages!):
  • references to old RT tracker tickets (used Dec 2000 – Dec 2006)
  • references to old GForge tracker tickets (used Jan 2007 – Dec 2008)
  • references to other trac tickets (#x -> https://trac.osgeo.org/…)
    • see also https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Bug_tracking

3. Source code migration: the new git repositories

• github repository “grass” (repo)
  
  • Source code from 1999 to present day (SVN-trunk -> git-master)
  • all 7.x release branches
• github repository “grass-legacy” (repo)
  
  • separate repository for older GRASS GIS releases (3.2, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x), hence source code now available in git since 1987!
• github repository “grass-addons” (repo)
  
  • repository for addons
• github repository “grass-promo” (repo)
  • repository for promotional material
• github repository “grass-website” (repo)
  • repository for upcoming new Website

4. Remarks on the “grass-legacy” repository

What special about it:

• the source code goes back to 1987!
• file timestamps (which I tried to preserve for decades :-) have been used to reconstruct the source code history (e.g., releasebranch_3_2)
• junk files removed (plenty of leftover old binary files, files consisting of a special char only etc)
• having this grass-legacy repo available in parallel to the main grass repo which contains the  recent source code we have a continuous source code coverage from 1987 to today in git.
• size is about 250MB

What’s missing

• the 4.3 source code doesn’t have distinct timestamps. Someone must have once packaged without mtime preservation… a pity. Perhaps a volunteer may fix that by carrying over the timestamps from GRASS GIS 4.2 in case the md5sum of a file is identical (or so).

5. Trac issue migration

A series of links had to be updated. Martin Landa invested days and days on that (thanks!!). He used the related GDAL efforts as a basis (Even Rouault: thanks!). As the date for the trac migration we selected 2007-12-09 (r25479) as it was the first SVN commit (after the years in CVS). The migration of trac bugs to github (i.e. transfer of trac ticket content) required several steps:

Link updates in the ticket texts:

• links to other tickets (now to be pointed to full trac URL). Note that there were many styles of referring in the commit log message which had to be parsed accordingly
• links to trac wiki (now to be pointed to full trac URL)
• links source code in SVN (now to be pointed to full trac URL)
• images and attachments (now to be pointed to full trac URL)

Transferring:

• “operating system” trac label into the github issue text itself (following the new issue reporting template)
• converting milestones/tickets/comments/labels
• converting trac usernames to Github usernames
• setting assignees if possible, set new “grass-svn2git” an assignee otherwise
• slowing down transfer to match the 60 requests per second API limit rate at github

6. Fun with user name mapping

Given GRASS GIS’ history of 35+ years we had to invest major effort in identifying and mapping user names throughout the decades (see also bug tracker history). The following circumstances could be identified:

• user present in CVS but not in SVN
• user present in SVN but not in CVS
• user present in both with identical name
• user present in both with different name (well, in our initial CVS days in 1999 we often naivly picked our surnames like “martin”, “helena”, “markus”, “michael” … cute yet no scaling very much over the years!) as some were changed in the CVS to SVN migration in 2007, leading to
  • colliding user names
• some users already having a github account (with mostly different name again)

We came up with several lookup tables, aiming at catching all variants. Just a “few” hours to dig in old source code files and in emails for finding all the missing email addresses…

7. Labels for issues

We cleaned up the trac component of the bug reports, coming up with the following categories which have to be visually grouped by color since the label list is just sorted alphabetically in github/gitlab:

• Issue category:
  • bug
  • enhancement
• Issue solution (other than fixing and closing it normally):
  • duplicate
  • invalid
  • wontfix
  • worksforme
• Priority:
  • blocker
  • critical
  • feedback needed
• Components:
  • docs
  • GUI
  • libs
  • modules
  • packaging
  • python
  • translations
  • unittests
  • Windows specific

Note that the complete issue migration is still to be done (as of Nov. 2019). Hopefully addressed at the GRASS GIS Community Sprint Prague 2019.

8. Setting up the github repository

In order to avoid users being flooded by emails due to the parsing of user contributions which normally triggers an email from github) we reached out to GitHub support in order to temporarily disable these notifications until all source code and selected issues were migrated.

The issue conversion rate was 4 min per trac bug to be converted and uploaded to github. Fairly slow but likely due to the API rate limit imposed and the fact that the migration script above generates a lot of API requests rather than combined ones..
Note to future projects to be migrated: use the new gihub import API (unfortunately we got to know about its existence too late in our migration process).

Here out timings which occurred during the GRASS GIS project migration from SVN to github:

• grass repo: XX hours (all GRASS GIS 7.x code)
• grass-legacy repo: XX hours (all GRASS GIS 3.x-6.x code)
• NNN issues: XX hours – forthcoming.

9. New issue reporting template

In order to guide the user when reporting new issues, we will develop a small template – forthcoming.

10. Email notifications: issues to grass-dev and commits to grass-commit

We changed the settings from SVN post-hook to Github commit notifications and they flow in smoothly into the grass-commit mailing list. Join it to follow the development.

Overall, after now several months of using our new workflow we can state that things work fine.

The post Remarks on SVN-trac to GitHub migration appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

The post GRASS GIS 7.8.1 released with PROJ 6 and GDAL 3 support appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

The latest PDAL release (Point Data Abstraction Library, http://www.pdal.io/, version 2.0.1) has now been packaged for Fedora Linux.
I have cleaned up the dependencies (also the annoying former installation bug with PDAL-devel has been resolved).

The installation is as simple as this (the repository is located at Fedora’s COPR):

# enable and install PDAL
sudo dnf copr enable neteler/pdal
sudo dnf install PDAL PDAL-libs PDAL-vdatums

# if you want to compile other software like GRASS GIS with PDAL support, then you also need
sudo dnf install PDAL-devel
# Now, run PDAL:
pdal-config --version
pdal --help

Enjoy!

The post PDAL 2.0.1 packaged for Fedora including vertical datums and grids appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

On February 4, 2006 OSGeo held its first meeting in Chicago, with 25 participants representing 18 groups and over 20 different Open Source GIS projects, and 39 others participating via Internet Relay Chat. During the meeting, participants made important decisions in the formation and organization of the foundation, including the name, structure and purpose. The consensus reached in Chicago opened the way for the establishment of a productive and representative foundation.

Today we are happy to announce that the we have meanwhile over 32,800 unique subscribers in the huge list of over 290 OSGeo mailing lists!

And: check out the web site of the OSGeo foundation.

1. More to come this year!

… see here for the growing list of events

The post Happy birthday OSGeo! appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

Please help us testing the Python3 support in the yet unreleased GRASS GIS trunk (i.e., version “grass77” which will be released as “grass78” in the near future).

1. Why Python 3?

Python 2 is end-of-life (EOL); the current Python 2.7 will retire in 11 months from today (see https://pythonclock.org). We want to follow the “Moving to require Python 3” and complete the change to Python 3. And we need a broader community testing.

2. Download and test!

Packages are available at time:

• winGRASS GIS 7.7svn daily builds with Python 3, available as standalone installers or in OSGeo4W (announcement)
• docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/mundialis/grass-gis7-trunk/
• … more following soon

3. Instructions for testing

• Use grass77 :-)
• https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Python3Support#Howtotest

4. Problems found? Please report them to us

Problems and bugs can be reported in the GRASS GIS trac. Code changes are welcome!

Thanks for testing grass77!

The post Call for testing: GRASS GIS with Python 3 appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

We are pleased to announce the GRASS GIS 7.6.0 release

What’s new in a nutshell

After almost 1 year of development the new stable release GRASS GIS 7.6.0 is available. Efforts have concentrated on making the user experience even better, providing many new useful additional functionalities to modules and further improving the graphical user interface. Furthermore, ZSTD has been added a new raster compression method which is an improvement over ZLIB’s deflate method, providing both faster and higher compression than ZLIB. Also a new raster map type has been added: GRASS virtual raster (VRT) which is a virtual mosaic of the list of input raster maps. In addition, support for PROJ v. 5 has been implemented. An overview of the new features in the 7.6 release series is available at new features in GRASS GIS 7.6.

Binaries/Installer download:

The post GRASS GIS 7.6.0 released appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

The post GRASS GIS 7.4.4 released: QGIS friendship release appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

We are pleased to announce the GRASS GIS 7.4.2 release

The post GRASS GIS 7.4.2 released appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

Today marks 35 years of GRASS GIS development – with frequent releases the project keeps pushing the limits in terms of geospatial data processing quality and performance.

GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is a free and open source Geographic Information System (GIS) software suite used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics and map production, spatial modeling, and 3D visualization. Since the major GRASS GIS 7 version, it also comes with a feature rich engine for space-time cubes useful for time series processing of Landsat and Copernicus Sentinel satellite data and more. GRASS GIS can be either used as a desktop application or as a backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R. Furthermore, it is frequently used on HPC and cloud infrastructures for massive parallelized data processing.

Brief history
In 1982, under the direction of Bill Goran at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL), two GIS development efforts were undertaken. First, Lloyd Van Warren, a University of Illinois engineering student, began development on a new computer program that allowed analysis of mapped data.  Second, Jim Westervelt (CERL) developed a GIS package called “LAGRID – the Landscape Architecture Gridcell analysis system” as his master’s thesis. Thirty five years ago, on 29 July 1983, the user manual for this new system titled “GIS Version 1 Reference Manual” was first published by J. Westervelt and M. O’Shea. With the technical guidance of Michael Shapiro (CERL), the software continued its development at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) in Champaign, Illinois; and after further expansion version 1.0 was released in 1985 under the name Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS). The GRASS GIS community was established the same year with the first annual user meeting and the launch of GRASSnet, one of the internet’s early mailing lists. The user community expanded to a larger audience in 1991 with the “Grasshopper” mailing list and the introduction of the World Wide Web. The users’ and programmers’ mailing lists archives for these early years are still available online.
In the mid 1990s the development transferred from USA/CERL to The Open GRASS Consortium (a group who would later generalize to become today’s Open Geospatial Consortium — the OGC). The project coordination eventually shifted to the international development team made up of governmental and academic researchers and university scientists. Reflecting this shift to a project run by the users, for the users, in 1999 GRASS GIS was released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). A detailed history of GRASS GIS can be found at https://grass.osgeo.org/history/.

Where to next?
The development on GRASS GIS continues with more energy and interest than ever. Parallel to the long-term maintenance of the GRASS 7.4 stable series, effort is well underway on the new upcoming cutting-edge 7.6 release, which will bring many new features, enhancements, and cleanups. As in the past, the GRASS GIS community is open to any contribution, be it in the form of programming, documentation, testing, and financial sponsorship. Please contact us!

About GRASS GIS

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

The GRASS Development Team, July 2018

The post Celebrating 35 years of GRASS GIS! appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

In order to simplify the installation of the latest PDAL release (Point Data Abstraction Library, https://pdal.io/, version 1.7.0 1.7.2) on Fedora, I have created an updated set of RPM packages, again including the vertical datums and grids available from OSGeo (i.e., .gtx files from here).

The installation is as simple as this (the repository is located at Fedora’s COPR):

# enable extra repos to satisfy dependencies
sudo dnf copr enable neteler/pdal-hexer
sudo dnf copr enable neteler/points2grid
sudo dnf copr enable neteler/laszip

# install minimal dependencies
sudo dnf install hexer
sudo dnf install points2grid

# enable and install PDAL
sudo dnf copr enable neteler/pdal
sudo dnf install PDAL PDAL-vdatums

# run it
pdal-config --version
pdal --help

Enjoy!

The post PDAL 1.7 packaged for Fedora including vertical datums and grids appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS and OSGeo News.

GRASS GIS 7.4.0: Wildfire in Australia, seen by Sentinel-2B

What’s new in a nutshell

After a bit more than one year of development the new update release GRASS GIS 7.4.0 is available. It provides more than 480 stability fixes and improvements compared to the previous stable version 7.2. An overview of the new features in the 7.4 release series is available at New Features in GRASS GIS 7.4.

Efforts have concentrated on making the user experience even better, providing many small, but useful additional functionalities to modules and further improving the graphical user interface. Users can now directly download pre-packaged demo data locations in the GUI startup window. Several modules were migrated from addons to the core GRASS GIS package and the suite of tools for ortho-rectification was re-implemented in the new GRASS 7 GUI style. In order to support the treatment of massive datasets, new compression algorithms were introduced and NULL (no-data) raster files are now also compressed by default. For a detailed overview, see the list of new features. As a stable release series, 7.4.x enjoys long-term support.

Binaries/Installer download:

• winGRASS 7.4.0: 32bit standalone installer | 64bit standalone installer
• winGRASS 7.4.0 OSGeo4W: 32bit OSGeo4W installer | 64bit OSGeo4W installer
• Debian
• EPEL6 (CentOS6, RHEL6, …)
• Fedora and EPEL7 (CentOS7, RHEL7, …)
• ubuntugis-unstable (Ubuntu LTS – Xenial, Trusty)
• grass-stable (Ubuntu non-LTS – Zesty)
• … further binary packages for other Linux distributions and Mac OSX will follow shortly, please check at software downloads.
  

Source code download:

• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass74/source/
• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass74/source/grass-7.4.0.tar.gz
• To get the GRASS GIS 7.4.0 source code directly from SVN, see here.

More details:

See also our detailed announcement:

• https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Release/7.4.0-News
• https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Grass7/NewFeatures74 (overview of new 7.4 stable release series)
• https://grass.osgeo.org/grass7/manuals/addons/ (list of available addons)

  First time users may explore the first steps tutorial after installation.

About GRASS GIS

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (https://grass.osgeo.org/), commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is an Open Source Geographic Information System providing powerful raster, vector and geospatial processing capabilities in a single integrated software suite. GRASS GIS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS GIS has been translated into about twenty languages and supports a huge array of data formats. It can be used either as a stand-alone application or as backend for other software packages such as QGIS and R geostatistics. It is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

The GRASS Development Team, Feb 2018

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