Community based software development: The GRASS GIS project
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The document summarizes the GRASS GIS open source project. It discusses the project's objectives of developing free GIS software and algorithms. It describes the international development team and communication structures used, including mailing lists, wikis and bug trackers. Legal aspects of code contributions and licensing are also briefly covered.
![Decision making GRASS project: rather clear expertises of the developers “ habitats” can be observed – developers only work on code families discussions (even lengthy) via “grass-dev” mailing list [ 1 ] New GRASS Project Steering Committee (PSC) formed in 2006 formal voting on “Requests For Comments” (RFCs) but only for SVN access granting and “political” decisions [1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev Other projects: similar to GRASS project, BUT: RFC voting also for technology changes](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/community-based-software-development-the-grass-gis-project-27200/85/Community-based-software-development-The-GRASS-GIS-project-37-320.jpg)
![License of this document This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en “ Community based software development: The GRASS GIS project ”, © 2006, 2007, 2008 Markus Neteler, Italy http://www.grassbook.org/neteler/teaching.html [ OpenDocument file available upon request: neteler at cealp it ] License details: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 You are free: - to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, - to make derivative works, - to make commercial use of the work, under the following conditions: Attribution. You must give the original author credit. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/community-based-software-development-the-grass-gis-project-27200/85/Community-based-software-development-The-GRASS-GIS-project-42-320.jpg)
Community based software development: The GRASS GIS project
- 1. Community based software development: The GRASS GIS project Seminar at Department of Information and Communication Technology University of Trento, 28 May 2008 M. Neteler neteler at cealp.it http://www.cealp.it FEM-CEA (Trento), Italy
- 2. Seminar Outline Introduction to the GRASS project Communication structure Code development Structure of the development team: be collaborative in the cyberspace Legal Issues
- 3. Objectives of GRASS project Continue to develop free software GIS (since 1982) Deliver high quality algorithms (often academia based) for spatial data analysis innovative visualization modeling and simulation Import of 3D DXF objects
- 4. Desktop GIS: GRASS GIS Brief Introduction – Development and System Requirements Developed since 1984, always Open Source , since 1999 under GNU General Public License Written in C programming language, portable code (32/64bit) International development team , since 2001 coordinated at ITC-irst, since 2008 at OSGeo.org Distributed as source code, precompiled binaries for various platforms, CDROM GNU/Linux MacOSX MS-Windows iPAQ
- 5. Spatial Data Types Supported Spatial Data Types 2D Raster data incl. image processing 3D Voxel data for volumetric data 2D/3D Vector data with topology Multidimensional points data http://grass.osgeo.org Orthophoto Distances Vector TIN 3D Vector buildings Voxel
- 6. GRASS GIS QGIS Geodata viewer with GRASS toolbox, GPS support, Printing Editor ... http://qgis.org
- 7. http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WxPython-based_GUI_for_GRASS GRASS GIS: New GUI – Python based
- 8. GRASS new features Flood simulation Trento 1966 Courtesy: www.questotrentino.it Piazza Duomo
- 9. GRASS: Person walking distance 10 minutes S. Fontanari - www.mpasol.it
- 10. GRASS: Person walking distance 30 minutes S. Fontanari - www.mpasol.it
- 11. WebGIS: Integration of data sources GRASS in the Web Real-time monitoring of Earthquakes (provided in Web by USGS) with GRASS/PHP: http://grass.itc.it/spearfish/php_grass_earthquakes.php
- 12. GRASS GIS Interoperability Data models and sources
- 13. GRASS: more than 20 years of free GIS http://grass.itc.it 1989: civil Internet 1994: first WWW GRASS 1.0 GRASS 4.2.1/4.3 GRASS 5.0 GRASS 5.1/5.7 GPL'ed GRASS 4.2 Manual code management Automated code management (CVS) PD 1993 1998 1999 1997 University of Baylor 1998 University of Hannover 2001 ITC-irst GRASS 6.0 2001 2005 U.S. CERL (1984-1995) GRASS Development Team (1997- today) 1984 GRASS 4.1 2000 GPL'ed GRASS Interagency Steering Commitee Open GIS Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Consortium (OGC) 1990 1992 2004 Open GRASS Foundation (OGF) 1994 1997
- 14. GRASS Source Code Statistics http://next.ohloh.net/projects/3666 GRASS 6 http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s24grassgis GRASS 6.2.0 release 31 Oct 2006 Visitors at http://grass.itc.it
- 15. GRASS Mailing List Statistics: messages per day ( http://gmane.org is a mailing list mirror) 600 per month
- 16. GRASS SLOC Analysis http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3666 Or do this analysis yourself - Download and run: http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/ SLOC Totals grouped by progr. language: ( Status GRASS 16 April 2007) ansic: 473155 (84.30%) tcl: 44256 (7.88%) sh: 19821 (3.53%) python: 10517 (1.87%) cpp: 10142 (1.81%) perl: 1608 (0.29%) ... Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 561,286 Person-Years = 154.05 ... Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 20,810,621 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40) Generated using David A. Wheeler's 'SLOCCount' Basic COCOMO model, but slightly different parameters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COCOMO#Basic_COCOMO GRASS 6.3.cvs, 16 Apr 2007 GRASS 6.4.svn, 23 May 2008
- 17. GRASS Documentation Neteler/Mitasova (2002/2004/2007) Kluwer/Springer Boston, 420 S. www.grassbook.org GDF Hannover bR (2005) free document, GNU FDL www.gdf-hannover.de The Programmer's Manual is 'doxygen' based, i.e. it is auto-generated from the source code.
- 18. Outline Seminar Introduction to the GRASS project Communication structure Code development Structure of the development team: be collaborative in the cyberspace Legal Issues
- 19. The actors Free Open Source Software (FOSS) Community
- 20. Communication tools: Project Portal
- 21. Job automatization: Let the computer do it! Cronjobs are a life saver! Web pages are maintained in SVN and updated via cron hourly Mirrors sites sync through rsync Weekly software snapshots are generated from SVN source code tarballs binary builts HTML and PDF manual pages local search engine
- 22. Communication tools: Wiki and Bugtracker Wish- and Bugtracker
- 23. Outline Seminar Introduction to the GRASS project Communication structure Code development Structure of the development team: be collaborative in the cyberspace Legal Issues
- 24. Changing source code: what happens? (1/2) tflag->description = _( "Print topology information only" ); if (G_parser(argc,argv)) exit( EXIT_FAILURE ); /* open input vector */ if ((mapset = G_find_vector2 (in_opt->answer, "" )) == NULL ) { G_fatal_error (_( "Could not find input map <%s>" ) , in_opt->answer); } Developer changes and enters: cvs ci -m”i18N macro added” main.c SVN source code repository USA Code differences email is auto-generated and sent to “ grass-commit” mailing list USA Email notification triggers updated of GRASS Quality Assessment System Canada
- 25. Changing source code: what happens? (2/2) Clone detection is run as well as other quality measures, results sent out Email notification triggers updated of GRASS Quality Assessment System Canada USA Code quality email is sent to “grass-qa” mailing list CIA open source monitor receives simplified QA message USA? CIA-IRC robot feeds #grass IRC channel on freenode.net
- 26. GRASS Quality Assessment I GRASS Test Suite Project: Automated usage tests on Linux and MS-Windows
- 27. Bug reports: Communication Flow (Percentages are estimated) 2. Developer detects bug 60 % 20% 20% Other developers New GRASS release 3. New feature SVN code Repository Release cycle 1. User sends bug report Bugtracker Mailing list 20% 80%
- 28. GRASS Quality Assessment II GRASS GIS Software Evolution Project: Software engineering
- 29. GRASS Quality Assessment II Improvement of source code base Ref.: A feedback based quality assessment to support open source software evolution: the GRASS case study S. Bouktif, G. Antoniol, E. Merlo, and M. Neteler, ICSM 2006
- 30. Outline Seminar Introduction to the GRASS project Communication structure Code development Structure of the development team: be collaborative in the cyberspace Legal Issues
- 31. FOSS Software development structures Organizational structures of development teams Developers Head Power users Linux Kernel GRASS Development Team/ GRASS Project Steering Committee Decision level + - SVN write access patch/docs contribution Developers GRASS: No BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_for_Life http://producingoss.com/
- 32. GRASS Development Team: Structure & “Code habitats” Two main types of developers are observed: generalist specialist (majority) It appears that many developer assign themselves to a “ code habitat ”, their area of expertise (in GRASS a selection of libraries or commands which are maintained) these “habitats” are often stable over years there are also partially abandoned code areas (~ 10% of the code) which are functional but aren't really getting improved A very few are experts for code portability (ANSI C etc standards) One “ garbage collector ” (generalist) fixes lots of odds 'n ends
- 33. GRASS Development Team: “Code habitats” Specialist example Intermediate example Generalist example (grey: various code areas) http://web.soccerlab.polymtl.ca/grass-evolution/cvs-stat/overall/module_sizes_glynn.png
- 34. Conflicts in the community Decision making the hard way (1/3) New feature added...
- 35. Conflicts in the community Decision making the hard way (2/3) First reactions, but...
- 36. Conflicts in the community Decision making the hard way (3/3) (later the day an explanation was posted) An important developer opposes (this code section is “his” habitat)
- 37. Decision making GRASS project: rather clear expertises of the developers “ habitats” can be observed – developers only work on code families discussions (even lengthy) via “grass-dev” mailing list [ 1 ] New GRASS Project Steering Committee (PSC) formed in 2006 formal voting on “Requests For Comments” (RFCs) but only for SVN access granting and “political” decisions [1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev Other projects: similar to GRASS project, BUT: RFC voting also for technology changes
- 38. Outline Seminar Introduction to the GRASS project Communication structure Code development Structure of the development team: be collaborative in the cyberspace Legal Issues
- 39. Code vetting Legal aspects License complicance (GRASS: GPL) Don't copy from books like “Numerical Receipes in C” Ensure that 3 rd party contributions are clean Employers must agree that work time is spent Full transparency and peer review help to minimize the risk. Apache or OSGeo Foundation Incubation phase Graduation http://incubator.apache.org/ http://www.osgeo.org/incubator
- 40. OSGeo Foundation: Founding projects Founded 4 th February 2006, Chicago http://www.osgeo.org http://www.osgeo.org/content/news/news_archive/open_source_geospatial_foundation_initial_press_release.html.html GRASS GIS
- 41. Why does a developer contribute to Free Software? I will help others (because) they will help me Everyone is expert of only a limited area... ...ask the expert if you don't know! The driving force behind FOSS development is meritocracy . EGOISM SIURTLA
- 42. License of this document This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.en “ Community based software development: The GRASS GIS project ”, © 2006, 2007, 2008 Markus Neteler, Italy http://www.grassbook.org/neteler/teaching.html [ OpenDocument file available upon request: neteler at cealp it ] License details: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 You are free: - to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, - to make derivative works, - to make commercial use of the work, under the following conditions: Attribution. You must give the original author credit. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
- 43. Free Software Proprietary Software Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Time B. Reiter 2004 after Wheeler 2004 Software operating costs (customer) Overhead due to training and rewrite of missing software