[GRASS-dev] GRASS 7 release planning

[Martin Landa]

Hi,

2014-06-23 10:56 GMT+02:00 Moritz Lennert <mlennert at club.worldonline.be>:

>> ... so, getting out 7.0 seems to be endless...
>>
>> A radical solution might be to change trunk into GRASS GIS 8. Then we
>> do not need to wait in 7 for API stabilization and can release it "as
>> is" and go ahead with the planned massive improvements.

I think that there is no need for GRASS 8 at this moment, it's not
related to GRASS 7 release management. The real problem is that we
don't have clear list of desired features for GRASS 7. Once we start
with RC stage we need to be sure that we are close to the final
release - to avoid RC for months or even several months like happen in
the past. We should also vote about RFC4 before we start with RC
stage. Personally I would start with GRASS 8 when there will be a
clear reason for that.

> This sound ok to me. So, ideally, at all times we should have one release
> branch and one development branch. Releases can then just be tagged from the
> release branch which gets only selected, well-tested, not to invasive
> backports from the dev branch.

That is also reason why I would keep trunk as 7.1 before we start with
tagging 7.0.0RC1.

> Once we decide that the dev branch is sufficiently different from release
> that backports become unfeasible, and sufficiently stabilised that we can
> branch a release branch out of it, we declare the previous release branch a
> legacy maintenance branch (with only limited bug fixing from that point on),
> and branch a new release branch.

I would prefer to create just release branches. E.g.

* We start with tagging 7.0.0RC1.
* We create releasebranch_7_1 from trunk
* Trunk becomes 7.2 or GRASS 8
* We continue with backports only in releasebranch_7_0 towards final release
* Development will continue in trunk and releasebranch_7_1
* After some period we freeze releasebranch_7_1 and create
releasebrach_7_2 from trunk/releasebranch_7_1.
* We start RC stage in releasebranch_7_1
* Development will continue in trunk a releasebranch_7_2.

[...]

> But, even though, I know you are in a hurry to get a grass7 release out of
> the door, don't you think that we should finish 6.4.4 first ?
>
> To be honest I think we will have to accept shipping OSGEOLive with 6.4.4...

Right, as far as I know Markus is off-line since 27/6. So let's start
with idea to mark RC2 as a final and release it _this_week_! I don't
know about any blockers. Any opinion? If you know about blockers let
us know about that ASAP!

Martin