[GRASS-PSC] GRASS 7 Migration from CVS to SVN

[Paul Kelly]

Hello Markus

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Markus Neteler wrote:

> Dear PSC,
>
> we should decide (or give a recommendation to the
> developers team) about the migration from CVS to SVN.
> This is currently holding the start of GRASS 7 development.

I would say not necessarily - a release branch could be created for the 
next stable release and then the major changes for 7 made in the CVS HEAD. 
But I think what we more or less decided in the last discussion was that 
we would use the move to SVN as a "crutch" to aid the 6.x/7.x development 
split. So in that sense you're right. As long as we all understand the 
implications of that (especially with regard to where to make bug fixes 
and where to add new development) then I think it will actually be a good 
help.

> Essentially, all want to migrate to SVN for various
> advantages already discussed. But we have to define
> where the hosting will take place. Currently there
> are two offers:
>
> - SVN with GForge at Intevation in Germany
> - SVN with Trac and Wiki at OSGeo.org
(out of interest - where is the OSGeo SVN server physically located and 
who is the sysadmin for it?)

I think (as Helena initially suggested in the last discussion) we should 
move to the OSGeo infrastructure, primarily for the social/shared support 
benefits Frank outlines. I just think we have to be clear that we're not 
proposing leaving Intevation because of any deficiencies with the 
infrastructure there - I can only say it's been amazingly reliable for 
years with almost no downtime at all and to my knowledge never a bug or an 
issue to report. Bernhard has always been there when needed to sort out 
any queries with access to the CVS server. He's been about for a while 
now and as far as I can make out from the mailing list archives was one 
of the major influences in actually having GRASS released under the GPL, 
and I think we owe him a lot of thanks for all his support of GRASS.

I wonder is it reasonable to expect Intevation to continue to support our 
old CVS repositories (grass, grass6, web, libgrass - are there any others) 
when we move the latest developments to a new infrastructure - perhaps we 
should simply move the whole thing to SVN? I don't know if they have any 
other projects using their CVS server - they might wish to close it down 
once we leave, to reduce the maintenance/support effort of maintaining it.
This is where I have slight reservations about the idea of using the move 
to SVN as a split-point in 6.x/7.x development: are we going to simply 
copy the grass7 repository in its entirety and rename it something like 
grass7? Or are we going to subtly modify the files and then reimport them 
into grass7. I'm not quite sure what's the plan and this certainly needs 
to be ironed out.

As to the other benefits of the OSGeo infrastructure (apart from 
community/social integration with the other projects), if the bug tracker 
/ repository integration works out well then that would be a nice added 
bonus. I have to say the way you couldn't Cc e-mail discussions into the 
Gforge bug tracker like you could with the old RT one was a big downside 
to using it more for me - I wonder does Trac have that capability?

Paul