[GRASS-dev] Re: testing in 6.5 before backporting to 6.4

[Hamish]

Helena wrote:
> Hopefully we don't need any official procedure for guarding
> the stability of what should be a stable release,

I don't think we do, my main motivator in this is remembering two releases
where two of my last minute changes broke the release for months. In one I
"just" broke ps.map, the other I broken the main start-up for first time
users* and spent six months responding to bug reports with "mea culpa,
please try building the latest from svn".
[*] IIRC a G_fatal_error() in a sub-sub-function call, before the module
was init'd. Very subtle bug, only time & testing by new users found it.

and then there was the time in the dev branch one of my shell scripts
did rm -rf "$UNSET_TMP_FILE"* and deleted someone's home dir... and the
time that using the stable branch for my production r.sun runs saved
a month's worth of computations as the dev branch had a new+unnoticed bug
in it.. well, I could go on but the point is that now as a result I am
uber-cautious about what goes into the stable branch, that's all. (Some
push-back from me being too cautious sometimes is healthy of course :)


Hamish