[GRASS5] GRASS 5.0.3 released

Hamish hamish_nospam at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 8 23:01:00 EST 2003


> Mixing huge internal changes (new vector format) with an absolutely
> needed cleaning of the code will be an absolute pain and indeed
> delaying the releases (the separate actions are possible ; mixing the
> two is problematic).
...
...
> And to prepare a major change (one of the core engine) we
> _must_ first discard all the unneeded code and rethink the
> organization just in order to not try to put new wine in old skins :
> putting a new engine in old weird bodywork won't give a racing car.
> This will just lead to a crash!


I would think that the GRASS 5.7 merge is the natural place to do such
pruning, due to the mechanics of building 5.7 currently. We should just
migrate things one by one to 5.7 (i.e. undo the'make mix' symlinks &
replace with real code in the CVS), only migrating good code instead of
a bulk copy of everything. Perhaps we should have some formal guidelines
for inclusion in the 5.7 CVS tree?
e.g.:
-  FP, NULL support
-  site_lists -> new vector points format
-  not a duplicate of existing functionality / code
-  module is updated to use datum support
-  others things?

Things like site support might continue to exist from 'make mix', but
not actually pollute the formal 5.7 CVS. As 'make mix' is a pain, this
encourages people to migrate or drop any outstanding functionality
quickly, rather than letting it sit half-way for several years (as with
current broken 4.3 code in 5.0's cvs).


Thus, the 5.7 code merge should remove any double functionality as a
side effect. I don't see any point in doing a massive cleanup on 5.4,
when it is already doomed to retirement. Also, I think it is important
only to have one active development branch at once, to focus the work.


This is my understanding of where code goes right now, please correct..

5.3/5.7 backward-compatible raster modules ==> 5.3 CVS ('make mix' & 5.7)
Any new sites or vector functionality ==> 5.7 CVS
Old sites (compatibility & bug fixes only) ==> 5.3 CVS
Anything else that isn't for 5.7 eventually ==> 5.3 CVS, not encouraged


I think this is sort of what the general plan already is anyway ??



?,
Hamish




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