[GRASSLIST:3633] Re: Safe to use GRASS 5?

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hello Roy,

in general the GRASS 5 beta releases are stable enough to work with.

Note that the developmen process of GRASS has significantly changed
from the 4 to the 5 series. GRASS is now a Free Software project
and utilises open development mostly done by volenteers.
These developer have taken up the massive and 
partly bloated code base of GRASS and have to cope with it.  
This takes time, but we are happy that the number of active
developers is growing steadily.

As with open development we try to release often.
And we require feedback and other help to get all the bugs fixed.
Thus if nobody tests GRASS beta releases, we might not find the
bugs in parts non of the alpha testers uses.

	Bernhard


On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 05:50:35PM +0000, Roy Sanderson wrote:
> I notice that the GRASS website now describes GRASS 5.0 as 'supported' and
> GRASS 4.3 as 'unsupported', whereas 4.3 had previously been described as
> 'current stable'.  Do I take it from this that it is now safe to upgrade to
> GRASS 5.0 pre3?  I realise with its pre3 status that it is not 100% stable,
> and that a lot of people are working hard to remove remaining bugs.
> However, most commercial software isn't stable when sold (or at least
> that's my impression judging by the number of patches needed just to get it
> running in some cases!).  So should I risk upgrading to 5.0, or await the
> release of 'stable' in presumably 6-12 months time?
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