[GRASS5] Next steps for GRASS

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Sun, Jan 06, 2002 at 06:44:03PM +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:

> 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 :-)

There is a saying that Free Software releases happen, 
when they are ready.
Even if we had planned otherwise, we have to delay a stable
grass 5.0.0 release if we find grave weaknesses.

On the other hand: We have to "release" tar balls at a contant rate.
Conclusion: We need another pre release, this might not be the last.

> 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.

Yes. 
The strategy should be to _only_ fix "critical" bugs on that branch.
All other fixes, enhancements and so on have to go in the grass50 trunk!

After the release we merge branch back on the trunk.

> 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.

If we have a stable release which will only contain modules that
are known to are stable, we can release add-on tarballs.
These add-ons can have various qualities attached.
We just have to mark them clearly.

	Bernhard


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