[GRASS5] suggestion for developers meeting

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 11:59:49AM -0500, Helena Mitasova wrote:
> Markus Neteler wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 12:42:37PM -0500, Helena Mitasova wrote:
> > > It may be easier just to go through the
> > > list of remaining bugs together and decide on the spot whether they are
> > > release critical and, 

We should not do a release in a hurry.
In general it is a good idea to rank the bugs and find a strategy
for a release. 

> > > It appeared that we were pretty close to the release but now
> > > it seems to be going away again.

I agree with Helena that it looks like we are more
far away from a release then we were before.

Generally our strategy of branching did not work out as I expected it.
We will of course have to maintain the GRASS 5.0.x line for a while
and the plan of the branches was to let us stabilise for a release.

> > The only problem is that a few basic thinks still don't work.
> > As requested I have tagged the critical bugs to "70" priority.
> > Feel free to downgrade them.
> 
> Markus some of your 70 priority bugs were identified as users
> error or wishes - so maybe whoever looked at the bug and changes
> it to wish can also change the priority (i haven't yet figured out
> how to do it, but I must admit that I did not try too hard, do I
> need to login?)

Yes, you have to log in to be able to manipulate bugs.
If you are logged it, it is easy:
	Display the the bug. (e.g. click on the number)
	Select the text "Current priority" 
	Change value.

Note that we have added https access to the bugtracker.
If possible use this if you log in as transmission of your password 
will be more secure.

	https://intevation.de/rt/webrt?q_queue=grass&logout=guest


> In fact the big group of bugs that came recently and that you put
> at 70 were really more inconvenieces, inconsistencies and wishes
> rather than bugs.  Even replacing d.legend by d.leg.thin should
> not be critical, although I am the one crying the loudest to get
> the legends working better (3 things are needed: add
> show=val,cats to d.leg.thin,
> make it possible to place and size the legend with a mouse for
> discrete categories, and have an option to define the values to be
> used in the legend to support non-linear
> maps) - but you can still do a lot of work with GRASS without these
> capabilities.

I have lowered some wishs to below 25, because they are not release critical.

> What seems to be serious is 825  r.poly 
> - Glynn suggest : Andrea would you have time to look at it?

Priority up to 75.

> 819 requires just adding a warning to i.rectify if system ifs full
> - can somebody do that? Otherwise this could be downgraded to 30
> (should the system let the user know that the system is full?)

New Priority: 50 as it is not release critical.

> 818 import of arcinfo files seems to be serious and complex so
> some decision needs to be taken as whether it could be solved or
> whether we just admit the the manual that not all cases of e00 can
> be imported.

> So it indeed looks like more work needs to be done, although I am
> concerned that given the size of GRASS, as soon as the release is
> done, we would get tons of additional bugs and wishes.

> Maybe we should say for the release that vast majority of modules
> is bugfree and reliable, however there are few that need some
> fixing for special cases of data and/or are not fully consistent
> with the rest of the modules and we welcome the contribution of
> additional users and developers in identifying and fixing those
> bugs, to make GRASS truly robust and reliable.  (wow, that is a
> long sentence).

We can add a KNOWN_BUGS section.
Grass does not need to be completely bug free when we release it.

> So I don't really know, as one can always dowload some pre*
> version and not really care whether it is called stable, final
> release or not.

> > > I hope that I am not too much of a pain with with this,

Keep the comments comming it is need to motivate the developers
and to get a feeling for what is important.

> > I would be glad to have it published. However, I cannot provide more
> > time to fix the problems than what I currently do...

You are already doing a lot and many many thanks for this work!

> > Suggestion: There are a few days left, perhaps we catch all critical
> > bugs until then? :-)

Not until we get a lot of developers up to help!
A lot of these bugs seems to be very easy to squash,
so I can only encourage all developers to look at the bugs
and see if they have a couple of minutes to fix for progress the
fixing of the bug.

Thanks,
	Bernhard

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