[GRASS-dev] [GRASS-PSC] GRASS6.4.4 release [was: Re: GRASS 7 release planning]

[Hamish]

Hi,


>>>  To be honest I think we will have to accept shipping OSGEOLive with 6.4.4...

The focus there is a split between being a showcase for new features and
super-stable introduction for new users. (power users might see past small
transient bugs, but if a new user finds rough edges in the first 5-15 minutes,
or before they get past the initial learning curve, the window of opportunity
is lost and they'll give up)
So far the balance on the disc has been to more favour stable over new. Feature
freeze is in just a couple weeks, QGIS plugin would need to be 100% ready and
rebuilt, and we'd not have a sample dataset included, would need to have a
GRASS_BATCH_FILE import script to set one up from the data already on the
disc.

fyi I plan to write a script which will be on the disc which will automatically
add the appropriate ppa repos and download+install the latest grass7 snapshot
and sample data.  What version does the foss4g workshop want to use? Note the NC
dataset only ships in geotiff+shapefile form so it can be used by all the
other projects too, due to disc space limitations the workshop setup will
have to download that too. (spearfish is small enough to include for G6 though)

There is a link on the live disc desktop to this URL:
  http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/wiki/Live_GIS_Workshop_Install

fwiw I will also be writing a G6 script for pre-installing some G6 addon modules.
If you have any you want included, place your orders in a osgeo trac ticket
please (LiveDVD component), cc 'hamish'.


>>  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!

I have been very busy with work recently, and will be for the next weeks too.
In the past I've been able to review all commits to the stable branch, right
now I am rather behind in that task. So if it goes out now just be warned that
I might be asking for a small-change 6.4.5 release after a month as some sort
of 6.4.4.1, since there are always some bugs to find. :-) I would also be a
bit slow on the Debian packaging this time and not sure if I could write the
release announcement.  Work and GSoC has all my time right now, sorry.


fwiw the debian rule for packages being accepted into the stable branch is not
that they are perfect, only that they are less buggy than the old version. For
the spatialite export bug I think that's fair advice to follow: it is not fixed,
but no more broken than the previous release. Since v.out.ogr is such a critical
module, and the fix requires the module to be improved with a bunch of 2D vs 3D
export logic, my vote would be to release 6.4.4 without it, but then try hard
soon after release to get it fixed, so maximum pre-release testing time. -- Even
though it's pretty crazy/embarrassing that GRASS isn't supporting export to
Spatialite currently.  My thoughts on r.li are very similar, chances are that the
big backport still has some maturing to do, but the earlier version was wrong
so perhaps-problems-but-improving beats known-bad.


best regards,
Hamish