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.

The post GRASS GIS 8.4.0RC1 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

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

The post GRASS GIS 8.4.0 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

The GRASS GIS 8.3.2 maintenance release contains more than 30 changes compared to 8.3.1. This new patch release includes important fixes and improvements to the GRASS GIS modules and the graphical user interface (GUI), making it even more stable for daily work.

The post GRASS GIS 8.3.2 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

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 […]

The post Translating Open Source Software with Weblate: A GRASS GIS Case Study appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

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 […]

The post GRASS GIS 8.3.1 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

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 […]

The post GRASS GIS 8.0.1 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

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! […]

The post GRASS GIS 8.0.0 released! Finally… appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

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!

The post GRASS GIS 8.0.0RC2 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

What’s new in a nutshell

As a follow-up to the previous GRASS GIS 7.8.4 we have published the new release GRASS GIS 7.8.5 with more than 80 improvements. This minor release offers new wxGUI fixes across the tree. Also the addon extension manager received various stability fixes. VRT raster map with tiled raster maps can now be properly exported and imported in the native GRASS GIS raster format.

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/7.8.5-News.

Binaries/Installer download:

• winGRASS 7.8.5/standalone: 32bit standalone installer | 64bit standalone installer
• winGRASS 7.8.5/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-7.8.5.tar.gz
• To get the GRASS GIS 7.8.5 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, Dec 2020

The post GRASS GIS 7.8.5 released appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

Call for Participation for FOSDEM 2021 geospatial devroom

Submission Deadline: 26.12.2020

FOSDEM is the largest free and open source developers meeting in Europe, with 8000+ participants. It normally takes place in Brussels (Belgium).

FOSDEM 2021 will be an online event. We will have a geospatial devroom again. The geospatial devroom will be on Saturday, 6 February 2021. In 2021 it will be our opportunity to bring our global community to FOSDEM.

The geospatial devroom is the place to talk about the state of the art of open, geo-related data, free and open source geospatial software and its ecosystem. This includes standards and tools, e.g. spatial databases, online mapping tools, geospatial services, used for collecting, storing, delivering, analysing, and visualizing geodata.

We are looking for you to be part of the geospatial devroom. The geospatial devroom aims to host talks about geospatial topics, GIS, and geodata projects, standards and open data.

Please submit your talk till 26. December 2020.

You find detailed information about the CfP at:
https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/osgeo-at-fosdem-2021-online-call-for-participation/

We hope you will submit a talk or come around at FOSDEM 2021.

See you at FOSDEM 2021

The post OSGeo at FOSDEM 2021 (Online) – Call for Participation for the geospatial devroom appeared first on Markus Neteler Consulting.

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.

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.

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.

The post GRASS GIS 7.2.0RC1 released appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS Courses.

The post New stable release of GRASS GIS 7.0.0! appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS Courses.

The post QGIS 2.6 ‘Brighton’ released appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS Courses.

Watch how the community based GRASS GIS 6.4 software development evolved! You can see how the individual contributors modify and expand the source code:

• Dec 29, 1999: GRASS GIS 5.0 is being stored in an online source code repository in December 1999…
• Dec 02, 2000: The developers work on all parts of the code…
• Jan 15, 2002: Working on the future GRASS GIS 5.1 release
• Nov 25, 2002: Starting GRASS 5.1 development with code restructuring
• Jun 14, 2004: GRASS GIS 5.7 released in June 2004
• Nov 09, 2004: Source code restructuring to get a better directory layout (all other developers waiting…)
• Nov 09, 2004: … thousands of files are modified in this operation …
• Nov 10, 2004: All developers resume their activities after the restructuring
• Jan 10, 2005: Preparing the GRASS GIS 6.0.0 release…
• Apr 09, 2005: GRASS GIS 6.0.0 published, release branch being split off from trunk for easier maintenance
• Feb 22, 2006: Release of GRASS GIS 6.0.2 and new source code refactoring startedApr 05, 2006: Heavy development activity in trunk (development branch) …
• Oct 25, 2006: GRASS GIS 6.2.0 released in October 2006
• Apr 10, 2007: Preparing the GRASS GIS 6.2.2 release…
• Jun 16, 2007: GRASS GIS 6.2.2 released in June 2007
• Nov 01, 2007: Raster and vector modules being actively maintained…
• Apr 02, 2007: New graphical user interface development speeding up (wxGUI)
• Feb 20, 2008: Copyright statements prettified in many files
• May 31, 2008: New GRASS 6 development branch being split off from trunk (which becomes GRASS 7)
• Jun 10, 2008: Developers moving over to new branch
• Feb 23, 2009: GRASS 6.4 release branch split off from GRASS 6 development branch
• Apr 03, 2009: GRASS GIS 6.4 preparations starting…
• Feb 24, 2010: Intense maintenance in GRASS 6.4 release branch
• Sep 15, 2010: GRASS GIS 6.4.0 released in September 2010
• Apr 12, 2011: GRASS GIS 6.4.1 released in April 2011
• Jun 27, 2011: GRASS GIS 6.4.svn matures for the upcoming 6.4.2 release
• Aug 16, 2011: Intense maintenance in GRASS 6.4 release branch (GRASS GIS 7 development not shown here)…
• Feb 19, 2012: GRASS GIS 6.4.2 released in February 2012
• Nov 13, 2012: Backporting graphical user interface bugfixes from GRASS GIS 7 to GRASS GIS 6.4
• Apr 17, 2013: Further maintenance in GRASS 6.4 release branch
• Jul 10, 2013: Fixing odds ‘n ends for the new stable release
• Jul 27, 2013: GRASS GIS 6.4.3 released in July 2013

The corresponding timeline is also available at
http://grass.osgeo.org/home/history/releases/

THANKS TO ALL CONTRIBUTORS!
http://grass.osgeo.org/development/

Rendering: Markus Neteler
Audio track editing: Duccio Rocchini & Antonio Galea

Music:
Le bruit peut rendre sourd – Track 6/18 Album “Sensation electronique” by Saelynh (CC-BY-NC-ND) http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/1236/le-bruit-peut-rendre-sourd

Software used:
Gource software: http://code.google.com/p/gource/ (GPL)
OpenShot video editor: http://www.openshotvideo.com/ (GPL

The post Video: GRASS GIS development visualization from 1999 to 2013 appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS Courses.

The OSGeo-Live geospatial software collection version 7.0 has been released, featuring more than sixty open source, standards compliant geospatial desktop applications, web applications and frameworks. A complete installation kit and high-quality sample data in multiple industry standard formats are included. The OSGeo Live will be officially launched at FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham, UK, 17-21 September, 2013.

Release Highlights

Projects new to this release include:

• GeoNode — a web-based application and platform for developing geospatial information systems (GIS) and for deploying spatial data infrastructures (SDI)
• Leaflet — a modern, open source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps
• ncWMS — a Web Map Service (WMS) for geospatial data stored in CF-compliant NetCDF files
• netCDF dataset — daily maximum temperature and rainfall, worldwide

All geospatial applications on the disc have been updated to their latest stable releases.

About OSGeo-Live

OSGeo-Live is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB flash drive and Virtual Machine based upon Ubuntu Linux (version 12.04 LTS). OSGeo-Live is pre-configured with a wide variety of robust open source geospatial software. All applications can be trialled without installing anything on your computer, simply by booting the computer from a DVD or USB drive, or running in a Virtual Machine environment. Each featured package is accompanied by both a publication quality one page descriptive summary and a short tutorial on how to get started using it.

http://live.osgeo.org

OSGeo-Live includes:

• Over sixty quality geospatial Open Source applications installed and pre-configured
• Free world maps and geodata
• One page overview and quick start guide for every application
• Overviews of key OGC standards
• Translations to multiple languages

Credits

Over 160 people have directly helped with OSGeo-Live packaging, documenting and translating, and thousands have been involved in building the packaged software.

Packagers, documenters and translators include:

Activity Workshop, Agustín Dí­ez, Aikaterini Kapsampeli, Alan Beccati, Alan Boudreault, Alessandro Furieri, Alexander Bruy, Alexander Kleshnin, Alexander Muriy, Alexandre Dube, Alexey Ardyakov, Alex Mandel, Amy Gao, Andrea Antonello, Andrea Yanza, Andrey Syrokomskiy, Andry Rustanto, Angelos Tzotsos, Anna Muñoz, Antonio Falciano, Anton Novichikhin, Anton Patrushev, Argyros Argyridis, Ariel Núñez, Assumpció Termens, Astrid Emde, Barry Rowlingson, Benjamin Pross, Brian Hamlin, Bruno Binet, Cameron Shorter, Christophe Tufféry, Christos Iossifidis, Cristhian Pin, Damian Wojsław, Dane Springmeyer, Daniel Kastl, Daria Svidzinska, David Mateos, Denis Rykov, Diego González, Diego Migliavacca, Dimitar Misev, Dmitry Baryshnikov, Dominik Helle, Edgar Soldin, Eike Hinderk Jürrens, Elena Mezzini, Eric Lemoine, Estela Llorente, Etienne Delay, Etienne Dube, Evgeny Nikulin, Fran Boon, François Prunayre, Frank Gasdorf, Frank Warmerdam, Friedjoff Trautwein, Gavin Treadgold, Giuseppe Calamita, Gerald Fenoy, Grigory Rozhentsov, Guy Griffiths, Hamish Bowman, Haruyuki Seki, Henry Addo, Hernan Olivera, Howard Butler, Hyeyeong Choe, Ian Edwards, Ian Turton, Ilya Filippov, Jackie Ng, Jan Drewnak, Jane Lewis, Javier Rodrigo, Javier Sánchez, Jesús Gómez, Jim Klassen, Jing Wang, Jinsongdi Yu, Jody Garnett, Johan Van de Wauw, John Bryant, Jorge Arévalo, Jorge Sanz, José Antonio Canalejo, José Vicente Higón, Judit Mays, Klokan Petr Pridal, Kristof Lange, kuzkok, Lance McKee, Lars Lingner, Luca Delucchi, Lucía Sanjaime, Mage Whopper, Manuel Grizonnet, Marc-André Barbeau, Marco Curreli, Marco Puppin, Marc Torres, Margherita Di Leo, Maria Vakalopoulou, Mario Andino, Mark Leslie, Massimo Di Stefano, Mauricio Miranda, Mauricio Pazos, Maxim Dubinin, Michaël Michaud, Michael Owonibi, Micha Silver, Mike Adair, Milena Nowotarska, M Iqnaul Haq Siregar, Nacho Varela, Nadiia Gorash, Nathaniel V. Kelso, Ned Horning, Nobusuke Iwasaki, Oliver Tonnhofer, Òscar Fonts, Otto Dassau, Pasquale Di Donato, Patric Hafner, Paul Meems, Pavel, Pedro-Juan Ferrer, Pirmin Kalberer, Raf Roset, Ricardo Pinho, Roald de Wit, Roberta Fagandini, Roberto Antolin, Roberto Antolí­n, Roger Veciana, Ruth Schoenbuchner, Samuel Mesa, Scott Penrose, Sergey Grachev, Sergio Baños, Simon Cropper, Simon Pigot, Stefan A. Tzeggai, Stefan Hansen, Stefan Steiniger, Stephan Meissl, Steve Lime, Thierry Badard, Thomas Baschetti, Thomas Gratier, Tom Kralidis, Toshikazu Seto, Trevor Wekel, Valenty González, Vera, Xianfeng Song, Yoichi Kayama, Zhengfan Lin

Sponsoring organisations

• The Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGeo provides the primary development & hosting infrastructure and personnel for the OSGeo-Live project, and infrastructure for many of the software projects themselves. http://www.osgeo.org/
• LISAsoft provides sustaining resources and staff toward the management and packaging of software onto the Live DVD. http://www.lisasoft.com
• Information Center for the Environment (ICE) at the University of California, Davis provides hardware resources and development support to the OSGeo Live project. http://ice.ucdavis.edu
• Remote Sensing Laboratory at the National Technical University of Athens, provides hardware resources and development support to the OSGeo-Live project. http://www.ntua.gr
• The DebianGIS and UbuntuGIS teams provide and quality-assure many of the core packages. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianGis and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGIS

The GRASS GIS community is delighted to present the outcome of the 4th Community Sprint that took place in a warm and sunny Prague, Czech Republic, from July 12 to July 18, 2013. The event happened after the Geoinformatics conference at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The Community Sprint was once more a creative gathering of both long-term and new developers, as well as users.
This meeting was held in the light of 30 YEARS OF GRASS GIS!

We wish to cordially thank the Department of Mapping and Cartography, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague for hosting and technical support. In particular, we gratefully acknowledge our association sponsors OSGeo  and FOSSGIS e.V., and many individual donors: Peter Löwe, Andrea Borruso, Massimo Di Stefano, Alessandro Sarretta, Joshua Campbell, Andreas Neumann, Jon Eiriksson, Luca Casagrande, Karyn O Newcomb, Holger Naumann, Anne Ghisla, Helena Mitasova and Lubos Mitas, Dimitris Tamp, Mark Seibel, Markus Metz, and Tawny Gapinski. These financial contributions were used to cover costs such as meals and to help reducing travelling and accommodation expenses for participants with far arrival who came on own expenses.

Developers and users who joined the event came from various countries like Italy, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Poland, Sri Lanka/France, USA and Germany.
The Community Sprint focused on:

• testing/bugfixing of the upcoming GRASS 7 version,
• backporting new functionalities to the stable GRASS 6.4 series,
• testing/bugfixing related to Mac OS X, MS-Windows and Linux,
• presenting and developing the new Temporal GIS Algebra in GRASS 7,
• connecting GRASS 7 with the planetary science software ISIS,
• discussing integration with rasdaman.org software, a powerful multidimensional raster processor,
• creating 3D vector test data for 3D interpolation,
• discussing vector conflation,
• discussing Bundle Block Adjustments,
• presenting the state of image processing in GRASS 7, and discussing its future,
• improving documentation, with focus on image processing and Temporal GIS Algebra,
• developing/refactoring and bugfixing several wxGUI’s components,
• further developing customizable wxGUI Toolboxes concept,
• improving translation in Polish and Romanian languages,
• fixing v.krige in GRASS7 and proposing merge with the recently developed v.kriging module,
• meeting between Google Summer of Code 2013 mentor and students.

A lot of topic oriented discussions happened among small groups of participants: for more detailed information, please visit the Wiki pages at http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Community_Sprint_Prague_2013 and the related discussion page at http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Talk:GRASS_Community_Sprint_Prague_2013

About GRASS GIS
The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, 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 is distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). GRASS GIS is an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

GRASS GIS Development Team, July 2013

Fourth (and last) release candidate of GRASS GIS 6.4.3 with improvements and stability fixes
A fourth release candidate of GRASS GIS 6.4.3 is now available.

Source code download:

• http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/
• http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/source/grass-6.4.3RC4.tar.gz

Binaries download:

• winGRASS 6.4.3RC4 standalone installer
• winGRASS 6.4.3RC4 in OSGeo4W installer
• Arch Linux
• openSUSE One-Click installer
• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow leopard
• … further packages will follow shortly.

To get the GRASS GIS 6.4.3RC4 source code directly from SVN:
 svn checkout http://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/tags/release_20130710_grass_6_4_3RC4

Key improvements of this release include some new functionality (assistance for topologically unclean vector data), fixes in the vector network modules, fixes for the wxPython based portable graphical interface (attribute table management, wxNVIZ, and Cartographic Composer), fixes in the location wizard for Datum transform selection and support for PROJ.4 version 4.8.0, improvements for selecting the Python version to be used, enhanced portability for MS-Windows (native support, fixes in case of missing system DLLs), and more translations (esp. Romanian).