[GRASS-dev] Release policy: towards an urgent GRASS GIS release with Python3 support

[Markus Neteler]

Dear all,

we rather urgently need to publish trunk as the new stable version in
order to get rid of the current Python2 issues.
Python2 is close to EOL and being slowly dropped. Our interfaces to
other software including QGIS require Python3. Also packaging becomes
increasingly difficult on various operating systems as well as the
usage of GRASS GIS in cloud environments (Openshift etc).

I would suggest to only publish a single release of GRASS GIS 7.6 and
to concentrate on the 7.8 release with Python3 support.

Hence, I propose to start a new releasebranch_7_8 asap.

The following maintenance scheme would result:

- releasebranch_6_4: sleeping, rather EOL
- releasebranch_7_2: EOL
- releasebranch_7_4: LTS
- releasebranch_7_6: interim stable release
- releasebranch_7_8: LTS
- trunk: G79, towards 8

Again, we need to come to speed with Python3 support in terms of
actually releasing it and the current trunk version looks works quite
well.

We may discuss to make 7.6 LTS and 7.4 EOL but many distros won't
allow to update to 7.6 nor a 7.6 LTS will motivate us to avoid
backporting and focus on 7.8 :-)

Opinions?

Markus


PS:
- EOL (End Of Life)
- LTS (Long Term Support)