[GRASS-dev] GRASS 6.4.0 release branch forthcoming

[Paul Kelly]

Hi Markus

On Sun, 2 Nov 2008, Markus Neteler wrote:

> (cc Tim Sutton)
>
> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 7:30 AM, Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Paul wrote:
>>> I still think at some point a 6.4 release branch will be needed (when we
>>> want to add new features) but I think we should put off creating it as
>>> long as possible to reduce work. That's all - it depends on other
>>> developers agreeing to restrict the changes we make to develbranch_6
>>> for a while though.
>
> There is an additional reason:
> QGIS is going into feature freeze (they are already at 1.0 Preview 1).
>
> I really want to avoid that they have to package 6.3.0 into it, just
> because some GRASS developers are unhappy to see a 6.4.0
> release branch.

Can you explain further? If we say that develbranch_6_4 is not going to 
have new incompatible features added to it before releasebranch_6_4 is 
created, is that enough? I can't imagine that we would need to create a 
release branch before it is absolutely necessary, just to give reassurance 
to the QGIS developers that we are going to keep our word not to add new 
incompatible features?

>> So my 2c plan of action would be to first finalize the module list (trac
>> task #344) in the next week by bringing over addons destined for main.
>> Once that is done we could tag a release_$DATE_grass_6_4_0RC1 directly
>> from devbr6 and declare devbr6 to be temporarily in stability mode.
>
> ok, let's go...

FWIW I think Hamish's plan sounds good too.

>> Once r.out.gdal and other critical issues are dealt with, and the newly
>> merged modules have had a chance to settle in (inevitable portability
>> issues that pop up, etc)
>
> [portability will only pop up if packaging is actually done which isn't
> for winGRASS unless a relbranch is there]

If there's a release candidate I'm sure it will spur people on to do some 
testing on the various platforms. FWIW I have a working MinGW compilation 
environment again, on Windows Vista, and I'm happy to do some Windows 
testing there. Why do you say we need a release branch for that?

Paul