[GRASS-dev] GRASS 6.4.0 release branch forthcoming

[Markus Neteler]

Hi Paul, all,

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Paul Kelly
<paul-grass at stjohnspoint.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi Markus
>
> On Sun, 2 Nov 2008, Markus Neteler wrote:
>
>> (cc Tim Sutton)
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 7:30 AM, Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Paul wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I still think at some point a 6.4 release branch will be needed (when we
>>>> want to add new features) but I think we should put off creating it as
>>>> long as possible to reduce work. That's all - it depends on other
>>>> developers agreeing to restrict the changes we make to develbranch_6
>>>> for a while though.
>>
>> There is an additional reason:
>> QGIS is going into feature freeze (they are already at 1.0 Preview 1).
>>
>> I really want to avoid that they have to package 6.3.0 into it, just
>> because some GRASS developers are unhappy to see a 6.4.0
>> release branch.
>
> Can you explain further? If we say that develbranch_6_4 is not going to have
> new incompatible features added to it before releasebranch_6_4 is created,

This is a not easy goal, but we can try. Simply *all* devs have to accept
a feature freeze (in the past we weren't very successful on that AFAIR).

> is that enough? I can't imagine that we would need to create a release
> branch before it is absolutely necessary, just to give reassurance to the
> QGIS developers that we are going to keep our word not to add new
> incompatible features?

That's not the point I think. I spoke to Tim Sutton in Cape Town.
What they need is a release (candidate) to work with. A moving
target like devel_grass6 isn't acceptable for them.

In the past, they used the 6.3.relbranch since they could be sure
that this wasn't polluted with new features. They hope for something
similar for 6.4 now.

...
>> [portability will only pop up if packaging is actually done which isn't
>> for winGRASS unless a relbranch is there]
>
> If there's a release candidate I'm sure it will spur people on to do some
> testing on the various platforms. FWIW I have a working MinGW compilation
> environment again, on Windows Vista, and I'm happy to do some Windows
> testing there. Why do you say we need a release branch for that?

We can certainly freeze devel_grass6 and just tag RC1 directly from that
and test it rigorously. But are we sure that nobody inserts new features?
Especially in the wxPython arena, there are a couple of issues yet to be
submitted (AFAIK) which would easily count as new feature.

But I am fine with the soft-freeze plan as far as we keep discipline (including
me :). We just need to actually DO it.

Markus