[GRASS5] Let's release 5.4 asap

[Paul Kelly]

Hello Markus

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Markus Neteler wrote:

> Hi developers,
>
> I still didn't read all the messages from the last weeks
> but would like to suggestion to get out 5.4 as soon as possible
> (means within days/weeks time frame). There is not much point
> in not releasing it for two main reasons:
>
> - 5.0 is now really outdated
>
> - In the community 5.0 is considered to be stable and so it is
>   heavily used (we saw that in Bangkok). People complained about
>  problems which we already solved month/years ago. On the other
>  hand it is pretty difficult to convince them to change to
>  5.3 as they say "why is it indicated as development version then?".

But for a long time now it has said on the website 5.3 is 'testing' and 
5.0 is 'stable but outdated' which I feel is a very good discouragement 
from using it. Straight away we could delete 5.0 from the list on the 
front page leaving only 5.3 and 5.7 I think.

>  Software can always be better. Waiting with a 5.4 release doesn't
>  make sense as open things are not going to be solved in the
>  near future (shared libs on Mac etc). So, please, let's get 5.4
>  out and "downgrade" 5.0 in it's importance.

The thing is that once 5.4 is released we are going to stop CVS access to 
the grass repository and only work on 5.7. But considering people are 
going to be going on using 5.3 for many many years we still need to fix 
everything that was added since 5.0 but is not finished yet.

>
>  To have 3 versions on the web site is considered to be very
>  confusing (I heard that many times the last weeks).

Well we can take 5.0 off right now I think.

>
> Putting much efforts into 5.3 (tcltkgrass etc) might not be worth the 
> time spent.

I think it will greatly reduce the volume of annoying complaints from 
people in the future if we make sure what's there now works, before 5.4.

> We have 5.7 and we should concentrate on this version.
> So, what's holding a 5.4.0 release? Any important problems which
> will be fixed *soon*? Let me cite these mails:
>
> http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/2004-July/014954.html
> http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/grass5/2004-July/014955.html
> "my plan is that when 5.3 can be compiled with shared libraries on all
>  supported platforms, we should make this the default and release it as
>  5.3.1"
>
> We are probably years away from that due to personal time constraints.

Maybe not as far as it seems. I said to Lorenzo that I may have access to 
a Mac at my new job now, where I could test out the shared libraries 
problems on OS X. I think Cygwin is already OK. I just haven't asked the 
person with the Mac for access yet.


> Instead of holding the 5.4 release for further month/years, we should
> get it out. Once the shared lib problems are solved we can publish the
> next subversion.

I'm not sure about that---I thought there would be virtually no more 
changes at all to 5.4 after we release 5.4.0. That understanding is what 
would make me hesitant to agree to a quick release. If that was changed, 
things would be different.

Paul