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

Carl Worth cworth at east.isi.edu
Tue Apr 23 14:09:18 EDT 2002


On Apr 23, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
 > Carl: 
 > It is great that you are willing to help.  
 > GRASS will certainly benefit.

Thanks. I hope so.

 > As a project it is quite unique, we are matching a broader range
 > of people in a huge project. Users and developers.
 > We have to be careful.

I can appreciate that. I do realize that the diverse nature of GIS
applications gives GRASS a very broad audience, (with primarily
non-programmers I would imagine -- many of which probably end up
having to do some programming to get the job done). ;-)

I hope I didn't come across as blazing in here trying to upheave the
hard work that many have put into making things functional. My
congratulations to all! GRASS is a huge and complex system and it is
wonderful that it works as well as it does.

I did want to forestall some potential problems before they got worse
though.

I'm willing to follow group consensus and go along with systems that
are already in place so that we can all get some important work done.

So, with that, I'm willing to put effort into making the grass51 tree
very good. I've seen lots of redundant code in GRASS that I want to
refactor into shared modules/libraries. I've seen several problems
with artificial hard-coded limits that I would like to eliminate.

I have a lot of ideas for exploring with GRASS and I'm glad to have an
area like the grass51 module where I can explore and rip things apart
without impacting those who are trying to make a release.

But, on the flip side, if I start copying modules over into the
grass51 directory, there are two immediate concerns:

	1) Each file will thereafter be forked. If new changes are
           made within the grass module, then grass51 will be missing
           them.

	2) All history will be lost as files are copied from grass
           over to grass5.

Maybe the GRASS development community accepts both of these as
necessary evils and acceptable since the code needs to be changed so
much anyway?

If so, I'll forge ahead. But, I tend to be very careful before
creating forked development paths like this.

-Carl 



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