[GRASS5] Reasons for GRASS 5 beta9 being delayed

[Markus Neteler]

Dear GRASS Community,

the long awaited release of GRASS 5 beta9 is still somewhat delayed. Here
some reasons for that:

We want to provide (again) a heavily improved version of GRASS 5. A lot of
work has been done since the release of beta8 in July. If you are
interested, you can see the improvements which are already implemented
(you can get this version from CVS or get the CVS snapshot source code
package):

List of improvements:
http://freegis.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/~checkout~/grass/NEWS.html

(Note: this URL is a link to the GRASS CVS server where the source code is
 managed by the developers in a centralized way. This allows to present
 always the latest version of the NEWS file - and we don't need to update
 the web site regularly.)

Towards GRASS 5.0stable the number of missing bugfixes is only small. Just
15 (known) release-critical bugs are left! However, instead of calling the
forthcoming GRASS 5 beta9 a "stable" release, we have decided to publish the
last "beta" release. This allows to implement final fixes on bugs which have
been not found yet. Please report all problems you may find while using the
new beta9 (anyway, we hope to receive only few reports due to the improved
quality of beta9)!

The intention of GRASS 5.0stable is publish a reliable, stable GIS
environment. New ideas like an improved vector format, modularized
(component-based) GRASS, improved user interface, full graphical login, new
source code structure, etc. etc. are already under development and will be
introduced in GRASS 5.1 after the release of GRASS 5.0stable. So many nice
improvements are waiting for the next major release. But current focus is on
providing a stable version which can replace the GRASS 4.x.

Hope this clarifies the situation!

Kind regards

 Markus Neteler
 GRASS Development Team

-- 
Dipl.-Geogr. Markus Neteler *  University of Hannover
Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology
Schneiderberg 50 * D-30167 Hannover * Germany
Tel: ++49-(0)511-762-4494  Fax: -3984

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