Re: Grass, Versions, Packages, How to?

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Marshall Feldman wrote:

> I recently installed cygwin, and the program Grass running under it, on a
> computer with Windows XP Professional. Everything seemed to go fine.
> However, I can start Grass and select a mapset from the initial screen.
> Then, when I tell it to "Enter Grass" I get an error message in a window
> labeled "ps.map Unable to locate component" and the error message says
> libgrass_gis.6.1.cvs.dll was not found.
> 
> I looked for this situation on the various Grass mailing lists, found others
> with this problem, and found one suggestion to install a newer version of
> Grass. Although I downloaded and installed cygwin only a week or two ago,
> and the latest version of Grass is 6.0.2 (released in FEB-06), my version is
> 6.0.0 (at least the screen says this), which is over a year old. So to fix
> the problem, I want to locate and download 6.0.2.
> 
> I don't get how cygwin packages work. Do I somehow ask cygwin to find and
> download this version. Ordinarily, with Windows binaries, I'd just google
> for the file, download the zip, uncompress, and install. With Unix programs,
> it's even easier: download, tar, and maybe move the files under /usr/bin.
> 
> Can anyone suggest the best strategy for attacking the problem? In order of
> increasing difficulty, I can see these options:

Grass is not an official Cygwin package -- meaning that whereever you
got it from is not associated with Cygwin in any way -- so this list is
really the wrong place to ask about this.

In general, package management under Cygwin works exactly the same as it
does with any linux distribution.  You can download binary packages from
the vendor (in the case of Cygwin this means the list of mirrors
presented to you in setup.exe, and the packages listed at
http://cygwin.com/packages/ ), or you can get binary packages from
unassociated third parties.  But note that you need to ask on their
mailing lists for help, as generally the @cygwin.com mailing lists have
no knowledge or control over these third parties, and are reluctant to
be bothered with such things.

In either case you use the same tool to install them (which is setup.exe
for Cygwin.)  Or you can download the source code and build+install as
usual.  But if you do this you lose out on any patches or configure
flags that might be necessary for proper operation, which is what you
get by using a binary package built by a maintainer.  So if you build
from source you should know what you're doing, or at least you need
confirmation that the package builds OOTB.

Brian