[GRASS5] Splitting GRASS 5 into stable and unstable

Bernhard Reiter bernhard at intevation.de
Tue May 9 17:43:14 EDT 2000


On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 11:54:42AM -0400, Eric Mitchell wrote:
> "When To Branch" is one of those fundamentally  tricky 
> questions of software development.  

I am almost certain that we need to branch. 
That means, we need a road leading to a very stable grass5.0 
and another that leads to new development version and a cleanup
of grass. But I agree that it is a tricky question.

> What this branch is trying to accomplish is (as I understand
> it, feel free to correct me here) to protect the architectural
> integrity of the pending grass-5.0 release.

Yes.

> The fundamental question here is (again, IMHO) "Are
> there pending significant changes to the grass-5.x 
> code base?"  I haven't followed the developer list 
> long enough to know the answer to this.

Again, yes. Markus pointed them out in his next post.

If we agree that we need a stable and a development tree we have
at least two technical options of implementing the scheme.
One is to use the branch feature of CVS, the other is to
create a parallel fresh module tree in CVS.

David was raising exactly this issue.
And this is another difficult question. I tend towards the
cvs branch method right now. Structural changes will still be possible 
within CVS. You can remove files from certain cvs branches.

I assume that even in the development version a lot of GRASS huge
codebase and filesnames will stay the same. The technical advantage in
using CVS branchen then is, that only the changed files and directories
actually will be kept two times in the repository. And it will be
possible to merge generall patches relatively easy. It is also a lot
easier to switch to a seperate CVS tree from a CVS branch as the other
way round.

Just my 0.02 Euro,
	Bernhard

-- 
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