[GRASS5] Using CVS to manage "experimental" vs. "stable" trees

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 04:37:53PM +0000, Carl Worth wrote:
> So, you can take my post as food for thought and we can revisit this
> again when the time is right.

Great!

> PS. I will respond in line to a few points, but we probably don't need
> too much more discussion.

> I know it was messier before. When I first tried GRASS I was extremely
> confused as I was using the head and it was broken in several ways
> that no one on the list could explain, (since they were all off on
> some branch). 

This did not work out as planned. 
As you can see developers had to adjust to CVS.
One problem was, that we never released it and people
were not sure enough about using the branch.

This is a reason why I'm pushing the release and more strict checking.



> Ah, but there is renaming. There are web pages now that say:
> 
> 	grass50 (stable tree)
> 	grass51 (experimental/development tree)
> 
> All such references will have to be chased down and fixed to make the shift.

That's peanuts. :)
We have to inform people about what is going on anyway.
I hope when more people help with the webpages, we get more dynamic.
(wait a second)

	THIS _is_ A CALL for HELP with DOCUMENTATION and communication.

(sorry, had to be done :) )

Just check a project like Abiword, 
which does a lot to inform people (weekly reports, bug votes...)
It is really appreciated. We need to find people to organise this for GRASS. 

(This is another reason to work with more structure,
we look cleaner.)

>  > On the other hand, directory reorganisation within a tree 
>  > with CVS is difficult, we had to use subversion or other revision
>  > control system for this.
> 
> Directory reorganization is painful, yes. But it is not really much
> easier to reorganize the code and add it to a new module than to
> reorganize it "in place" within one module.

With grass51 we can be more radical.
We will cut in the repository directly or set it up freshly if needed.
There is no other way with CVS' limited abilities.
Masterplans probably do not work.

> For example, grass51 still doesn't have most of the code moved over. I
> think this is because restructuring the organization of something as
> large as the GRASS code is fundamentally hard. 

Yes, but also because developers concentrate more on getting
at least _one_ stable release out.

> The extra burden of a
> few "cvs remove; cvs add" commands is really in the noise compared to
> the real work that needs to be done.

I agree, but now we can play.
If you are willing do to it, you can just move over stuff
without having the big consensus first.
We can only learn in the process.

We do not want to mess up the grass5 tree with this.


>  > Looses history and is complicated.
> I don't see how there is any history loss here.
I take this back partly was a bit beside the point anyway.

> But, at the same time, the majority of the GRASS development community
> doesn't need much parallel development. 

Right now, we do.
Did I tell you about the _very_ conservative user base. :)


> I think I'll be wanting to make some posts about how to tackle certain
> aspects of the reorganization, (after I digest what's already written
> up).
> 
> Is this list the correct venue for such discussion? I don't want to
> muddle the work on getting the release done.

It is the right place.
If you massively get active we can think about an additional list.
I think this can take a bit more.
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