How to contribute to GRASS GIS development: Guidance for new developers in the GRASS GIS Project.

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The GRASS GIS 8.4.0RC1 release provides more than 515 improvements and fixes with respect to the release 8.3.2. Please support us in testing this release candidate.

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Today, we celebrate a true geospatial legend: GRASS GIS!

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The GRASS GIS 8.4.0 release provides more than 520 improvements and fixes with respect to the release 8.3.2.

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The GRASS GIS Annual Report for 2023 highlights a year of significant achievements and developments in the GRASS GIS project, which celebrated its 40th anniversary. Here’s a summary of the report: Community Meeting: The GRASS GIS Community Meeting was held in June at the Czech Technical University in Prague, bringing together a diverse group of […]

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Open source software projects thrive on the contributions of the community, not only for the code, but also for making the software accessible to a global audience. One of the critical aspects of this accessibility is the localization or translation of the software’s messages and interfaces. In this context, Weblate (https://weblate.org/) has proven to be […]

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What’s new in a nutshell The GRASS GIS 8.3.1 maintenance release provides more than 60 changes compared to 8.3.0. This new patch release brings in important fixes and improvements in GRASS GIS modules and the graphical user interface (GUI) which stabilizes the new single window layout active by default. Some of the most relevant changes […]

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The 8.2.0 release of GRASS GIS is now available with results from the GSoC 2021 and many other additions. A new grass.jupyter package is now included for interacting with Jupyter notebooks. Single window graphical user interface is available in GUI settings. r.series and three other modules are newly parallelized. Additionally, the release includes a series […]

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This is an update release of the GRASS GIS 8.0 series. Download source code tarball at https://grass.osgeo.org/grass80/source/grass-8.0.1.tar.gz https://grass.osgeo.org/grass80/source/grass-8.0.1.md5sum For further release details (bug fixes and enhancements), see https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/Grass8/NewFeatures80 The GRASS GIS 8.0.1 release provides more than 20 fixes and improvements with respect to the release 8.0.0. What’s Changed Important fixes utils/mkhtml: fix print warning/fatal message […]

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Overview of changes After more than 3 year of development the first stable release GRASS GIS 8.0.0 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. Breaking news: new graphical user interface with entirely rewritten startup sequence! […]

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Overview of changes

After more than 3 year of development the first stable release GRASS GIS 8.0.0 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.

Breaking news: new graphical user interface with entirely rewritten startup sequence!

This re-establishes user experience compatibility with QGIS and other connected software packages.

The GRASS GIS 8.0.0 release provides more than 1,300 fixes and improvements with respect to the release 7.8.6.

With the introduction of the semantic label raster metadata class, the temporal database was modified to version 3. Hence, to be able to read and process GRASS 7.x space-time datasets, users will be prompted to run t.upgrade. If users want to read newly created space-time datasets back in GRASS 7.x, they can run t.downgrade.

Launching the software

The user experience of the graphical user interface has been completely rewritten: no more clumsy selection screens – just enter the menu system directly!

And on command line, GRASS GIS now starts versionless, i.e. as grass.

Download and detailed list of changes

See https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/releases/tag/8.0.0RC2

Thanks to all contributors!

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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.

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!

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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

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Towards the new stable release series

As of 24 May 2016, a new stable release branch was created for the upcoming GRASS GIS 7.2 release. This new branch includes all the many improvements which have been implemented in the former development version 7.1.svn.

What is a branch? In simple words, it is a kind of directory in the software development server (SVN in our case) in which no more development but only bugfixing happens. From a release branch, new stable releases are created and published.

The actual branches in the GRASS GIS project are:

• very old stable: releasebranch_6_4 (used for bugfixing and to publish stable GRASS GIS 6.4.x releases) – very low release frequency (started in revision r34936)
• old stable releasebranch_7_0 (used for bugfixing and to publish stable GRASS GIS 7.0.x releases) – perhaps one last release upcoming (branch started in revision r59487 but development already started in Apr 2008 in r31142)
• new stable releasebranch_7_2 (used for bugfixing and to publish stable GRASS GIS 7.2.x releases) – upcoming series of stable releases (branch started in revision r68500)
• trunk (used for development, with pseudo-name 7.3.svn) – under heavy development

Note to SVN users

The trunk branch with pseudo-name 7.1.svn has become 7.3.svn due to the creation of the new 7.2.svn release branch. You can simply continue to update from SVN, the version will be automatically updated.

If you used to work with the 7.0.svn release branch, consider to download the new 7.2.svn release branch, either from the weekly source code snapshot (here) or from the SVN server directly (here).

About GRASS GIS

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (http://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, May 2016

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Sometimes, we developers get reports via mailing list that this & that would not work on whatever operating system. Now what? Should we be so kind and install the operating system in question in order to reproduce the problem? Too much work… but nowadays it has become much easier to perform such tests without having the need to install a full virtual machine – thanks to docker.

Disclaimer: I don’t know much about docker yet, so take the code below with a grain of salt!

In my case I usually work on Fedora or Scientific Linux based systems. In order to quickly (i.e. roughly 10 min of automated installation on my slow laptop) try out issues of GRASS GIS 7 on e.g., Ubuntu, I can run all my tests in docker installed on my Fedora box:

# we need to run stuff as root user
su
# Fedora 21: install docker 
yum -y docker-io

# Fedora 22: install docker
dnf -y install docker

# enable service
systemctl start docker
systemctl enable docker

Now we have a running docker environment. Since we want to exchange data (e.g. GIS data) with the docker container later, we prepare a shared directory beforehand:

# we'll later map /home/neteler/data/docker_tmp to /tmp within the docker container
mkdir /home/neteler/data/docker_tmp

Now we can start to install a Ubuntu docker image (may be “any” image, here we use “Ubuntu trusty” in our example). We will share the X11 display in order to be able to use the GUI as well:

# enable X11 forwarding
xhost +local:docker

# search for available docker images
docker search trusty

# fetch docker image from internet, establish shared directory and display redirect
# and launch the container along with a shell
docker run -v /data/docker_tmp:/tmp:rw -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
       -e uid=$(id -u) -e gid=$(id -g) -e DISPLAY=unix$DISPLAY \
       --name grass70trusty -i -t corbinu/docker-trusty /bin/bash

In almost no time we reach the command line of this minimalistic Ubuntu container which will carry the name “grass70trusty” in our case (btw: read more about Working with Docker Images):

root@8e0f233c3d68:/# 
# now we register the Ubuntu-GIS repos and get GRASS GIS 7.0
add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
add-apt-repository ppa:grass/grass-stable
apt-get update
apt-get install grass7

This will take a while (the remaining 9 minutes or so of the overall 10 minutes).

Since I like cursor support on the command line, I launch (again?) the bash in the container session:

root@8e0f233c3d68:/# bash
# yes, we are in Ubuntu here
root@8e0f233c3d68:/# cat /etc/issue

Now we can start to use GRASS GIS 7, even with its graphical user interface from inside the docker container:

# create a directory for our data, it is mapped to /home/neteler/data/docker_tmp/
# on the host machine 
root@8e0f233c3d68:/# mkdir /tmp/grassdata
# create a new LatLong location from EPSG code
# (or copy a location into /home/neteler/data/docker_tmp/)
root@8e0f233c3d68:/# grass70 -c epsg:4326 ~/grassdata/latlong_wgs84
# generate some data to play with
root@8e0f233c3d68:/# v.random n=30 output=random30
# start the GUI manually (since we didn't start GRASS GIS right away with it before)
root@8e0f233c3d68:/# g.gui

Indeed, the GUI comes up as expected!

GRASS GIS 7 GUI in docker container

You may now perform all tests, bugfixes, whatever you like and leave the GRASS GIS session as usual.
To get out of the docker session:

root@8e0f233c3d68:/# exit    # leave the extra bash shell
root@8e0f233c3d68:/# exit    # leave docker session

# disable docker connections to the X server
[root@oboe neteler]# xhost -local:docker

To restart this session later again, you will call it with the name which we have earlier assigned:

[root@oboe neteler]# docker ps -a
# ... you should see "grass70trusty" in the output in the right column

# we are lazy and automate the start a bit
[root@oboe neteler]# GRASSDOCKER_ID=`docker ps -a | grep grass70trusty | cut -d' ' -f1`
[root@oboe neteler]# echo $GRASSDOCKER_ID 
[root@oboe neteler]# xhost +local:docker
[root@oboe neteler]# docker start -a -i $GRASSDOCKER_ID

### ... and so on as described above.

Enjoy.

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