[GRASS5] CVS tag documentation

[Carl Worth]

Markus Neteler writes:
 > Hi Carl,
 > Sorry for this confusion... In fact the release feature freeze is
 > exceptionally long. Therefore we'll use the Linux Kernel numbering
 > scheme for 5.1.

I think this is a fine idea.

 > > I'm also confused about the existence as grass51 in a separate
 > > directory/module in CVS.
 > 
 > Well, the reason is that grass51/ requires a complete change of the
 > directory layout. It would be a pain to do this in CVS. Therefore
 > we start more or less from scratch in a fresh CVS tree, which
 > already exists (containing the new 5.1 vector library).

Large-scale restructuring of directory trees in CVS can be painful,
indeed.

However, I'm not sure the proposed solution is much better. Developers
will still have to create the new structure and copy the old code over
into it with modifications and "cvs add" all files/directories. (These
are the same steps that would be needed to do it "in place" minus
several "cvs remove" operations).

But problems lie in the future. What happens when grass51 becomes
stable? Do we make a new grass52 directory and go through all the work
again? And how about all the references to checking out "grass" from
CVS. These will all become stale and difficult to maintain for each
major version.

IMHO, it would actually be much easier to just fix the structure
within CVS and leave the code in the "grass" module.

 > [thanks for the text piece, added to http://grass.itc.it/grasscvstags.html]
 > 
 > I have again slightly modified that page. Is it somewhat
 > better now?

You're welcome. It's better, but still misleading with regards to the
current state of the code. My paragraph suggests that the head of the
CVS tree will always have the most recent code, (with the possible
temporary exception of a few bug-fixes on the current "frozen"
branch).

However, it seems that currently the head of the CVS tree is actually
very out of date and probably not useful to anyone. So, either that
paragraph should be updated to match the current state of affairs, or
else the changes on the release branch should be merged back onto the
trunk of the CVS tree.

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                 cworth at east.isi.edu
3811 N. Fairfax Dr. #200, Arlington VA 22203		  703-812-3725