[R-sig-Geo] suggestion for spgrass6 - temp file in readVECT6

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Thursday, December 09, 2010, Pierre Roudier wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I got a suggestion for spgrass6. As far as I understand it, a
> temporary ESRI shapefile is written on the disk when using
> readVECT6('foo'), I guess then R is using rgdal to read that shapefile
> back in memory. Considering the various limitations of the ESRI
> shapefile format that does not occur with the GRASS internal format,
> could it be possible to add an option to choose the OGR format used in
> that process?
> 
> Also got a question for Roger I guess: I'm using now the grass7 svn
> trunk, should I expect any problems using the spgrass6 interface (I
> mean problems due to structural differences that appears in grass7
> that would not be handled by spgrass6, not problems due to grass7
> itself).
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Pierre
> 

This is an excellent point Pierre, and something that has caused significant 
pain the past-- in terms of column names and NULL value handling. Not 
everyone's GDAL/OGR will be configured in the same way-- so I don't know if 
altering the default behavior would be wise. However, adding an option (as you 
suggested) to use some other format, such as SQLite, would give power users a 
nice alternative to SHP format. SQLite would allow for longer field names, 
proper support for NULL data, and probably some other 'good things'.

Dylan



-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soil Resource Laboratory
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341