[GRASS5] Next steps for GRASS

[Markus Neteler]

Dear developers,

although the year is already a few days old:
a happy and prosperous new year to everybody!

The last year was pretty good for GRASS development, looking at
the "NEWS" list we can see the steady maturing into a stable system. 
The code is portable now on numerous architectures and operating 
systems, GRASS is running on nearly all UNIX derivates as well as 
MacOS X and MS-Windows (with Cygwin). Thanks to all for their 
contributions! I hope that the users enjoy the ongoing development.


If you allow, I have some suggestions for the next time (to be 
discussed):

As also proposed by others, we should release GRASS 5.0pre3
soon. Why another pre? Still some problems are remaining, 
especially with v.support and friends. I think that a stable GRASS
release still has to wait. Without a functional basic 2D vector
support an important part of GRASS would be missing. Probably, as 
some of the problems in v.support have been identified, it is not 
so difficult to get it working. 
So many talented programmers are here :-)

Then: An outcome of the developers meeting in Trento last November 
was that a merge back of the release_branch into the experimental 
tree is required for synchronization. However, from there we will 
create a new release_branch again which only contains the modules
intented for release as stable version.
Glynn and Radim (independently) have looked into this, the merge is 
not too difficult.
Radim has prepared a comparison:
  http://www.raz-dva.cz/krakonos/brafra.html

Then: As preparing a binary release of GRASS is not a really exciting
job, I want to set up a script for this. Here at Irst we can provide
Linux and SUN (some Solaris, don't know right now). But an IRIX machine
is not available. Probably someone is willing to provide some IRIX
computational power to also build a release for that platform. And
for Windows/Cygwin I propose to release the new generic driver
as an add-on package (if possible) to encourage more users to
test it.

Best regards

 Markus