Branching - was Re: [GRASS-dev] WxPython prototype GRASS GUI. Version 2

[Markus Neteler]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 05:08:08AM +0100, Glynn Clements wrote:
> Markus Neteler wrote:
> 
> > > But the 6.1 branch is less than a month old. How many fixes can there
> > > be which can't easily be merged into 6.1.x?
> > > 
> > > I'm not sure that having two stable versions based upon HEAD snapshots
> > > only a month apart makes sense.
> > 
> > I don't see a big difference (result) between
> > (a) branching again
> > (b) merging many things back
> 
> The difference is that (b) allows you to choose which changes to
> merge, i.e. include simple bug fixes but not more destabilising
> changes.
> 
> > The latter is much more effort. I currently have no time to
> > do more backporting of changes. That's why I proposed (a).
> 
> In that case, my inclination would have been to simply move the 6.1
> branch tag to the point where 6.2 would have been created. There
> doesn't appear to be much point in having an isolated 6.1 release for
> which any bugs will never be fixed.

Sounds absolutely reasonable to me. It wasn't clear to me that
this is possible (I only knew about tag shifting; since a branch is
more or less a tag it maybe works the same way?). Have to
get out my CVS book for that if noone else shifts the branch.

> For me, the main question is: what would be the reason for a user to
> choose 6.1.0 over 6.2.0?

No real reason despite the time lag (6.1.0 we can have today,
for 6.2.0 we would make a beta first). Again, I think that
there are some relevant changes which 6.2.0 do not want to miss
(means: no simple rename of 6.1.0 to 6.2.0) such as no more
low limit of open raster maps, MingW/Cygwin fixes and other recent
things. We should keep in mind that 6.2.x will be around for a while
and that e.g. QGIS builds on top of it. For distros like Debian, Gentoo,
Mandriva where packages depend on each other this makes a difference.
But that's maybe only my opinion. Probably our opinions aren't 
that far from each other?

Markus