[GRASS5] CVS tag documentation

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 10:53:10AM -0500, Carl Worth wrote:
> Markus Neteler writes:

>  > > 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).

CVS' internal structure might loose history information if we do
many add and removes with different names on different branches.
We are much more flexible if people know that this is the unstable
development tree.

> 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.

There are many possibilities.
First towards the references: People should be aware that CVS'
versions are for developers, the infrastructure and addresses can
change from time to time. So we should not have absolute references
in there and even if we have some it is not that harmful if they are
changed.

As for the directory names, we can rename or alias the repositories.
grass52 could get an alias for grass51 and then we could start
grass53 or something else.

We will learn in the process.
GRASS has a huge code base and I am very pleased that the
introduction of CVS for development actually starts to bear fruits
for the to become stable version. Branch handling is difficult.
	Bernhard
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