[GRASS5] GRASS 5.0.1 released

[Markus Neteler]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 11:06:42AM +0100, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 10:44:05AM +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 07:46:19PM +0100, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
[...]
> > > Thus 5.0.1 from the old release branch was just intermediate
> > > and for critical bugs.
> > 
> > Several important bugfixes didn't reach 5.0.1 due to the restrictions.
> 
> Well if they are really "important" 
> as a maintainer you could declare them critical.

Please note that I am *one of* the maintainers. It's not possible
for me to maintain 3xx modules. I can only dedicate some fraction of
a day to GRASS code maintenance like most developers.
I have also to control the numerous mailing lists (grass-commit
grass5, grassgui, nvizlist, sqlgrass, statsgrass, weblist, winGRASS)
including spam protection, a bit of RT maintenance, the regular
updates of the web pages (volunteers wanted also here!), the docs,
the grass site, several cronjobs to generate snapshots, find bugs etc.
I do not intend to complain, but time is really limited.

[...]
> > > The rule to only fix release critical bugs on a release branch
> > > in itself is fine. 
> > > We just have to go for a fresh release from the CVS HEAD sooner
> > > which should be about bug fixes and minor feature enhancements only
> > > anyway.
> > 
> > This is not clear to me, sorry. When creating a new branch from HEAD,
> > all fixes including new features such as the long awaited datum
> > transformation etc will reach it (or not?). Or do we count all
> > as bug fixes and minor feature enhancements?
> 
> Once you create a release branch from the CVS HEAD,

...someone, not me at time unless it is a single cvs command (which?).

> that should only exist a short period of time
> and only get critical bugfixes.
> It contains all bug fixes and minor feature enhancements
> which were done after the last release branch was branched.

We should be careful with opening and closing branches. 
Once we already had come confusion in 2001:
http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/2001-August/000701.html
when two branches were used in parallel.

I just feel that most of the branch sync'ing has been done
by Glynn so far. And we don't know if he wants to continue with
that (he did a great job!).
 
> Further bug fixes and minor features enhancements
> will continue to go into HEAD and be contained in the next release branch.
> 
> This scheme will motivate us to keep the release branches short lived, 
> because we want the bug fixes and features with the next releases.
> 
> > > This mostly means that the improvement can be delayed,
> > > because most people don't care. 
> > 
> > Here we have to distinguish between
> >  - developers who don't have time or who don't care
> >  - users who care and are not able to compile CVS HEAD. Especially
> >    for the users the slow release frequency is a problem:
> > 
> >    E.g. r.mapcalc was fixed weeks ago as well as NVIZ for tcl8.4. But
> >    only a few people can benefit from this bugfix.
> > 
> > This problem we should resolve soon,
> 
> We should make it more easy and educate more interesting users 
> to help testing prereleases and possible (still experimental) bug fixes.

Well, we'll see.

More comments are welcome!

 Markus