Talk:GRASS Developer Summit Raleigh 2025
Quick links: Meeting page | Reports | Sponsors
Organizing Team
- Initial planning: Vaclav Petras, Anna Petrasova, Veronica Andreo, Corey White, Lois Utt, Sarah White, Doug Newcomb, Huidae Cho, Veronica Andreo (Organizing Committee)
- Budget: Vaclav Petras, Lois Utt, Anna Petrasova
- Raising support: Helena Mitasova, Vaclav Petras, Anna Petrasova, Michael Barton, Giuseppe Amatulli (NSF POSE project proposal authors)
- Travel: Lois Utt
- Venue: Vaclav Petras, Lois Utt
- Meals: Lois Utt, Sarah White, Vaclav Petras, Corey White, Anna Petrasova
- Agenda: Vaclav Petras, Huidae Cho, Anna Petrasova
- Wiki page: Vaclav Petras, Anna Petrasova
- Swag: Sarah White, Vaclav Petras, Anna Petrasova, Corey White
- Promotion, invitations, and social media: Vaclav Petras, Sarah White, Corey White, John Vogler
- Lightning talks organization: Vaclav Petras, Zachary Arcaro, John Vogler
- Lightning talk speakers: Vaclav Petras (welcome), Markus Metz and Markus Neteler (talk presented by Vaclav Petras), Anna Petrasova, Veronica Andreo, Robert Dzur, Nick Brady, Huidae Cho, Gregory Power, Doug Newcomb, Caitlin Haedrich
- Photography: Caitlin Haedrich, Māris Nartišs, Pratikshya Regmi
Detailed Schedule
Day 1, Monday, May 19
Location: Talley Student Union, 2610 Cates Ave (map)
Room: 5101-Executive Board Room
Highlighted topic: Contributing to GRASS. Getting started. Is it easy to contribute?
| Time | Slot | |
|---|---|---|
| 8:30-9:00 | Breakfast | Catered breakfast on site. Meet people, and plan your personal agenda for the day. |
| 9:00-10:00 | Morning opening sessions | What to expect from the event, contributing to GRASS using Git and GitHub, making your first contribution. |
| 10:00-11:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 11:00-11:20 | Self-organized feedback session | i.hyper: Integrating Hyperspectral Imagery Processing into GRASS - Alen Mangafić |
| 11:20-11:40 | Self-organized feedback sessions | |
| 11:40-12:00 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Project Image - Vaclav Petras |
| 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | Catered food on site. |
| 13:00-17:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 18:00 | Dinner | We will walk to Trophy Brewing & Pizza (directions, 30 min walk from Talley) |
Day 2, Tuesday, May 20
Location: Talley Student Union, 2610 Cates Ave (map)
Room: 5101-Executive Board Room
Highlighted topics: Hydrology and Interfacing with R and QGIS (gathering user feedback, testing, discussing with developers, developing action items)
| Time | Slot | |
|---|---|---|
| 8:30-9:00 | Breakfast | Breakfast on site. Start the day, meet people, and plan your personal agenda for the day. |
| 9:00-10:00 | Morning opening sessions | Introduction to writing GRASS tools, program for the day. |
| 10:00-11:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 11:00-11:20 | Self-organized feedback session | fasterRaster R package - Adam Smith |
| 11:20-11:40 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Hydography90m + Geocomputation Courses - Giuseppe |
| 11:40-12:00 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Flood modelling with grass and itzi ([1]) - Laurent Courty |
| 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | Case dining hall |
| 13:00-17:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 18:00 | Dinner | Served in Jordan Hall at the Center for Geospatial Analytics, evaluate the day's accomplishments, plan and prioritize for the next few days. |
Day 3, Wednesday, May 21
Location: Talley Student Union, 2610 Cates Ave (map)
Room: 5101-Executive Board Room
Highlighted topic: Non-coding contributions, natural language translation, and internationalization.
| Time | Slot | |
|---|---|---|
| 7:00-9:00 | Breakfast | Case dining hall |
| 9:00-10:00 | Morning opening sessions | Introduction to non-coding contributions, deep dive into new documentation, natural language translation and internationalization (procedures, glossaries, code customization, translation). |
| 10:00-11:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 11:00-11:20 | Self-organized feedback session | Easier access to GRASS tools - Vaclav Petras |
| 11:20-11:40 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Temporal framework global variables ([2]) - Laurent Courty |
| 11:40-12:00 | Self-organized feedback sessions | GSoC call |
| 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | Served on site. Eat, drink, and continue the discussion from the feedback sessions. |
| 13:00-17:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 18:00 | Dinner | [https://maps.app.goo.gl/1E39eySMVaxYJUUS8 Picnic at Pullen Park, shelter #3. In case of bad weather, dinner at the Center for Geospatial Analytics. |
Day 4, Thursday, May 22
Location: Center for Geospatial Analytics, Jordan Hall, 2800 Faucette Drive (map)
Room: 5103 (straight from the two elevators, at the end of the hallway)
Highlighted topic: Project vision and computational engine use case.
| Time | Slot | |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00-9:00 | Breakfast | On site. Start the day, meet people, and plan your personal agenda for the day. |
| 9:00-10:00 | Morning opening sessions | Project vision and the computational engine use case (missing features, documentation, user groups). |
| 10:00-11:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 11:00-11:20 | Self-organized feedback session | Your topic here (10-minute presentation and 10-minute discussion) |
| 11:20-11:40 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Your topic here |
| 11:40-12:00 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Modernizing Color Tables (Brendan) |
| 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | On site. Eat, drink, and continue the discussion from the feedback sessions. |
| 13:00-16:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 16:00-17:00 | Lightning talks | Fast-paced talks, showcasing applications of GRASS, room 5111. |
| 18:00 | Reception | Connect with researchers, government professionals, and industry collaborators, rooms 5111 and 5119. |
Day 5, Friday, May 23
Location: James B. Hunt Jr. Library, 1070 Partners Way - Centennial Campus (map)
Room: Faculty Research Commons - 5100 (floor plan)
Highlighted topic: GRASS project's future course.
| Time | Slot | |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00-9:00 | Breakfast | On site. Start the day, meet people, and plan your personal agenda for the day. |
| 9:00-10:00 | Morning opening sessions | GRASS project's future course. |
| 10:00-11:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 10:00-11:00 | PSC meeting | Project Steering Committee meets (public). |
| 11:00-11:20 | Self-organized feedback session | Your topic here |
| 11:20-11:40 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Your topic here |
| 11:40-12:00 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Your topic here |
| 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | Walk to On the Oval Culinary Creatins. Eat, drink, and continue the discussion from the feedback sessions. |
| 13:00-17:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 18:00 | Dinner | Dinner on your own. Corey White will organize trip to downtown. Bus 41 from Hunt library to hotel and then walk. |
Day 6, Saturday, May 24
Location: James B. Hunt Jr. Library, 1070 Partners Way - Centennial Campus (map)
Room: Faculty Research Commons - 5100 (floor plan)
Highlighted topics: NSF POSE project evaluation.
| Time | Slot | |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00-9:00 | Breakfast | TBA. Start the day, meet people, and plan your personal agenda for the day. |
| 9:00-10:00 | Morning opening sessions | NSF POSE project evaluation, contributor community feedback. |
| 10:00-11:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 11:00-11:20 | Self-organized feedback session | Your topic here (10-minute presentation and 10-minute discussion) |
| 11:20-11:40 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Your topic here |
| 11:40-12:00 | Self-organized feedback sessions | Your topic here |
| 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | TBA. Eat, drink, and continue the discussion from the feedback sessions. |
| 13:00-17:00 | Focus time | Time to work on your laptop, whiteboard solutions with a group, or anything in between. |
| 18:00 | Dinner | TBA. |
Daily tasks for participants
- List all the things you are working on in the Participant reports section below. Update the list each day. Include things you work on with other people.
- If you want to discuss something with the whole group, add yourself to a Self-organized feedback sessions slot in the schedule above or tell Vaclav (Vashek) Petras.
- For people with triage access and above: If you are or will be working on an issue or on a PR which is not originally submitted by you, assign yourself to the issue or PR. (You can unassign yourself later if you change your mind.)
Participant reports
Per-person reports from the meeting.
Giuseppe Amatulli | Yale University
- Testing r.watershed and r.stream.* for handling large datasets
Veronica Andreo | CONICET - Instituto Gulich
- GitHub contributions
- Website footer enhancement
- Sync icons on the Tutorials website footer to those on the main website
- Fix descriptions and their display in the tutorials website
- Fix GRASS page on OSGeo website [3]
- Changed logo, removed GIS from the name, fixed old links
- Social media posts
- Discussion about hyperspectral with Alen and Anna
- Expand the GRASS acronym on the home page
- Remove GIS from GRASS name on the website
- Review tutorials by Huidae and Adam Smith
- GRASS PSC admin
Abdullah Azzam | New Mexico State University
- r.runoff
Michael Barton | Arizona State University
- POSE related activities
Laura Belica | NC State University
- have been working on developing a workflow-tool tutorial template that facilitates GRASS learners who tend to 'jump in' or have a 'choose your own adventure' approach to learning GRASS (i.e., want to use their data for their study area for their objective from the start). The structure of the tutorial template is a concise, basic, general description/instructions of the workflow with optional links to pertinent explanatory/deeper dive content (e.g., plain language explainers of the tool, options, defaults, etc.) in a variety of formats (e.g., captioned images, short tool demo videos (30 sec to 2 min)) in addition to the more comprehensive resources available (e.g. documentation, examples, tutorials). The main motivation for this approach is to help new and occasional GRASS users avoid some of the common pitfalls and to learn how to find workarounds for some of the unanticipated challenges they may encounter with their specific datasets or use cases so that they can learn as they go. Another motivation for this approach is to facilitate the translation, extension, and updating of workflow tutorials by the community over time (e.g., providing audio and closed captioning for one of the tool-demo videos in another language, replacing an outdated GUI demo with one for the current release, or incorporating a new add-on as an option in the workflow).
- my focus this week is on developing a draft/test tutorial (in Quarto) for a standard hydrological modelling workflow that begins with the crucial pre-work of how to figure out the appropriate project/location, etc. as well as considerations of some of the downstream impacts of resolution, extent, region etc. It may not be ready for sharing by the end of the week, but suggestions and advice are welcomed in advance.
19 May
- discussed a novice user issue with 'moving' vector data from one location to another with Vero and learned a neat GUI option
- revised and added workflow tutorial text
Shonil Sateesh Bhide | NC State University
- CI optimization
Huidae Cho | New Mexico State University
- CMake, conda, CI, Mentoring
Edouard Choinière
- Quick ideas, way too much for a week: Helping others (may take a reasonable part of the time), managing CI, setting up localization template updating workflow, backporting tool? Pytest/coverage improvements? Discuss and design other projects, to work on during the year. Open to change on other priorities once there, anything that is useful. Maybe make a little progress on high dpi GUI, especially on Windows.
- Weekend before sprint:
- Clear up Renovate PRs to not use CI time during the sprint, reviewing and merging: #5664, #5665, #5666, #5667, #5668
- PR to avoid some CI run time for the sprint: #5670
- Reviewed open PRs for PRs that were mergeable before the sprint, updated outdated PRs to avoid having it needing CI time during sprint. Only ended up merging #5658, but another reviewed one that might still need changes: #5628
- Monday May 19, 2025:
- PR got merged: #5670,#5550
- Reviewed PRs: #5671, #5672
- Discussions:
- Shonil Sateesh Bhid & Shuham on their CI & pytest work and project.
- Māris Nartišs about a potential issue and improvement for it. Will be discussed in the security reporting tab, also allowing to test the security vulnerability reporting process. + Research on existing solutions
- Reviewed: #5682, #5660,
- Reviewed, edited and merged: #3672
- Discussed/helped user for: #5678 and #5684
- Long discussion and vision planning for windows scripting with Vaclav, concerning #5624. Tested alternatives and tried the consequences of that PR. This older PR finally got merged.
- Created PRs for NSIS installer: #5685 and also #5686, which should address #5663. Still needs to test it.
- Agreed on convention for titles with Vaclav, unblocking #5341
- Found a name with Ondrej and finally merged older PRs of an external contributor #5473 and #5474
- Thursday May 20, 2025:
Laurent Courty
- An xarray backend for GRASS STRDS. Fixing related issues
- Presented itzi
- Uploaded arm64 wheels to PyPI for MacOS and Linux ([4])
Robert S. Dzur | Bohannan Huston, Inc.
- r.in.pdal
David W. Farris | East Carolina University
- A tool to calculate gravity terrain corrections
Neel Ghoshal | NC State University
• LLM for helping users find tools
5/19
• Learnt how to PR (#5674)
• Setup GRASS on system
• Found small issue with compilation document
• Discussed about the possible use case of LLM for helping users find tools
5/20
• Learnt about cookie cutter
• Set up wsl on system
• Compiled GRASS
• Listed data sources for LLM training
Caitlin Haedrich | NC State University
- Event photographs
- git/github mentoring
Brendan Harmon | Louisiana State University
- Developing (r.earthworks) addon & tutorials
- GitHub activity
Linda Karlovska | Czech Technical University in Prague
- I plan to work on GUI enhancements, particularly the Jupyter-style interactive page for enhanced scripting and visualization.
Martin Landa | Czech Technical University in Prague
- Tutorial: GISMentors courses updated (PR)
- libgis: G__usage_markdown() include tool label in metadata if defined (PR)
- PyGRASS: Module description property not defined always (PR)
- Website: OpenGeoLabs commercial support (PR)
- v.select: create output also when no features found (PR)
- wxGUI: avoid creating nested list of errors (Graphical modeler) (PR)
Nicklas Larsson | Hungarian National Museum
- CMake build system; perhaps Conda recipe
Chung-Yuan Liang
- parallelize some modules, improve testing
Andres Lucero | Bohannan Huston Inc
- r.in.pdal
Alen Mangafić | Geodetic Institute of Slovenia
Monday May 19
- Presentationf of i.hyper, add-on which offers hyperspectral data support in GRASS.
- Architecture of the multi-module addon
Tuesday May 20
- i.hyper.import module: importing EnMAP imagery as 3D raster map
- i.hyper.explore module: RGB, CIR and SWIR visualization from 3D hyperspectral raster map.
Helena Mitasova | NC State University
- standardized data set and related tutorials
- documentation for interpolation tools
- collaborate/coordinate/discuss hydrology tools (analytics, simulations, soil properties inputs)
- assist with wiki cleanup if needed
Monday May 16
- investigated issues with v.surf.rst documentation in source code, tested and identified fixes needed
- discussed coupling GRASS with Blender versus potree for 3D object rendering with Brendan, Anna and Caitlin (for TL activities and other applications)
- discussed soil data for runoff estimation and other hydro topics, to be worked on on day 2
Michael Mulqueen | MassGIS
- depth to water, hydro from lidar, etc
Māris Nartišs
- Preparing a new raster data analysis tool r.smooth for inclusion into GRASS core
- Discussing architecture of hyperspectral data import and per-processing tool
Ondřej Pešek | Czech Technical University in Prague
- Many things to fix/improve in g.gui.gmodeler, finally finish an addon for CNNs in GRASS
Vaclav (Vashek) Petras | NC State University
- GitHub activity
- computational engine, APIs, funding, summit organization
Anna Petrasova | NC State University
- GitHub activity
- plan: mentoring, documentation
- Monday
- discussing hyperspectral implementation with Alen
- helping mentee David Farris implementing his gravity correction addon
- Tuesday
- delivered intro to creating an addon, documentation
Gregory Power | Town of Cary
- Documentation
Pratikshya Regmi | NC State University
- I plan to showcase my work on integrating LLM and GRASS GIS.
Riya | Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee
- I am currently thinking of developing an AI Agent for the grass jupyter library which will help the users with mathematical calculations done in GIS.
Jayneel Shah | NC State University
- improve the test coverage of imagery modules.
Krishna Prasad Sheshadri
Adam Smith | Missouri Botanical Garden
- R package fasterRaster (fielding bug reports, adding features)
Monday: Assessed scope of fasterRaster issue 83
Michelle (Mimi) Stephens | ERDC
- Previous work: coupling R and Python scripts for computational analysis in GRASS.
- Current work: Running through GRASS commands to create visual outputs that can be added to the new GRASS 8.5 manual pages.
- Future work: Presenting on GRASS in JUNE at CERLCON.
Corey White | NC State University
- JSON, mentoring
Doug Newcomb | Semi Retired Cartographer
- Discussed hydroflattening method
- Discussed direct point cloud input to v.surf.rst
- Learning git procedures by updating branding (GRASS GIS to GRASS) for raster commands
Guests and remote participants
Luís de Sousa | University of Lisbon
- Review outstanding PRs
- Prepare GRASS sessions for the OpenGeoHub Summer School
Markus Neteler | mundialis
- Support full automation of new GRASS manual pages deployment on server (upload artifacts from GitHub to OSGeo servers (grass and download))
- Source code license documentation: Using SPDX License IDs (GitHub Issue #4190)
- Support Wiki cleanup
- GitHub contributions
Nishant Bansal | Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi
- Review the previous work on JSON during last year’s GSoC, including enhancements and the addition of JSON output support to other modules.