[GRASS-dev] GRASS extensions/addons mismatch

[Markus Metz]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 7:30 PM, Martin Landa <landa.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 2011/12/17 Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com>:
>> btw, my current feeling about the ~/.grass$MAJOR/addons$MAJOR.$MINOR.$BUGVER
>> specific path to protect from binary GIS_H incompatibility is that it
>> may be better to create a ~/.grass65/ in addition to ~/.grass64 to keep
>> the two separate.
>
> do you mean also to separate config files, eg. wxGUI settings? Then
> you would have eg.
>
> .grass64/wx and .grass65/wx.
>
> Unfortunately this layout doesn't allow to have installed extensions
> eg. for 6.4.2 and 6.4.3 or 6.4.2 and 6.4.3svn, you would end up with
> the same mismatch (expecting than extension will be installed in
> `.grass64/addons`). I think that
> `~/.grass$MAJOR/addons$MAJOR.$MINOR.$BUGVER` is more flexible
> approach. It's blocker for 6.4.2 (since you have asked RC3 for
> `g.extension` even it's not *really* ready, I would personally incline
> to postpone all the story to 6.4.3). After this request it's
> unrealistic to hope that we will release 6.4.2 till the end of the
> year. Bear in mind that RC2 didn't allowed to install extension on
> Windows at all.
>
> What's opinion of other developers?
>
IMHO, g.extensions should be only one module, not two versions ( one
as script, one through the wxGUI). Considering that 6.x has two GUIs,
any extension installer should not be restricted to a particular GUI
which for GRASS 6.x means a no-go for the wxGUI version. The GRASS 6.x
extension installer should properly install shell scripts and C
modules and their manuals. For shell scripts under windows, a *.bat
file needs to be created in $WHEREEVERYOULIKE/bin, as long as
$WHEREEVERYOULIKE/bin is added to the GRASS search path and the
corresponding *.bat file is invocing an existing *.sh file. Because
there are a number of C modules in the official GRASS addons, they
need to match the current GRASS version and revision, otherwise they
would bomb out with a library mismatch error. I would suggest to keep
the version match on the level of RC, e.g. addon modules compiled
against grass-6.4.2rc2 work only with grass-6.4.2rc2 and no other
version. People using grass-6.4.2.svn are supposed to know what they
are doing, i.e. reinstall any addon after every `svn up`.

Apparently this issue is far from resolved, therefore I would opt for
releasing rc3 asap and fix that in 6.4.3.

Markus M