[GRASS-dev] too many branches

[Hamish]

Markus Metz wrote:
> IMHO, it would make maintenance much easier if one of 6.4 and
> 6.5 would go rather sooner than later.

I absolutely and quite strongly disagree. It is invaluable to have
a staging area to test backports before putting them into the
stable branch, and trunk has diverged too far from 6.4 to allow
that to take the role.

We have experimental/trunk, limited testing for the stable branch,
and the final branch. Lately we've been pretty good about not
developing new code in devbr65, meaning clearer ideas about what
should be really backported into the 6.4 stable branch since
there is less noise.

We must -at all times- be ready to tag a new release from the
6.4 stable branch on very short notice. Partly in case a severe
data bug is found, but more critically if a license problem
turns up. If you get rid of your staging area it's impossible
to guarantee that the release branch will be at release quality
while bug fixes are being worked out and tested.

It also gives a chance for things which don't quite rise to the
level of "critical bugfix" to be left unshared. It's a *good*
thing that we can look through trac and pick and choose what
to actually put into 6.4.3.


if it helps:
To keep the merging burden low, I use a couple of tiny scripts
to make the merge command a trivial one liner. with the ending
of new development in 6.5svn this becomes even simpler.

svn65merge: run from trunk/ or relbr64/ dirs with rev # as
$ svn65merge 12345

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
  svn merge -c $1 https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/branches/develbranch_6
else
  echo "usage: cd grass7; svn65merge rev_number"
fi

#####

svn64merge: same, for pulling from relbr64 into devbr6:

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
  svn merge -c $1 https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/branches/releasebranch_6_4
else
  echo "usage: cd grass65; svn64merge rev_number"
fi

#####

and finally svn7merge: for pulling from trunk into devbr6:

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then
  svn merge -c $1 https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/trunk
else
  echo "usage: cd grass65; svn7merge rev_number"
fi

#####


best,
Hamish

(sorry I haven't been able to help much with the latest push,
I'm juggling 4 other deadlines right now; I'll jump in as soon
as I can)