[GRASSLIST:3324] Re: GRASSLIST digest 1364

[Paul Kelly]

Hello Michael

On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Michael Barton wrote:

> Paul
>
> Do I understand that this means 5.3 will become the new stable release?

Not in name no, the release will be made from the development branch (i.e.
the CVS HEAD) so it will be a development release. It won't be any
different to the weekly CVS HEAD source code snapshots that Markus
provides except it will have a different name, 5.3.0

In practical usage terms however, I would say that the CVS HEAD has been
the stable version of GRASS almost immediately from when 5.0 was released
in September 2002 and I have said on this list before how I didn't feel
having a separate stable branch was a good idea, as GRASS doesn't have
enough developer effort to maintain it.

> I heartily support this. I've been using 5.3 for 6 months now on Mac
> OSX. It is stable and, IMHO, a better version than 5.0.3. I realize

No doubt about that

> that there have been some problems with other systems. However, Glynn,

I'm sure fewer than with 5.0.x

> Richard Greenwood, and others seem to have fixed nearly all of these
> for Windows/Cygwin and it seems from the traffic I've followed that
> many (most? all??) of the prior issues with Linnux systems have been
> solved. I think Scott Mitchell will be adding the new I did menus to
> the CVS in a few days.

In my mind there is no question that 5.3 is and always has been much more
functional and stable to use than 5.0. The release on 15th May will not
change anything apart from hopefully alerting more people to that fact.

>
> One question, if this goes from development to 'production', will it
> switch from 5.3 to 5.4?

That will be when it will be called stable. And when that happens, all
work will stop in the grass CVS tree and switch to the grass51 tree. The
thing is that the code in the grass CVS tree will never be stable without
parts of it having a major re-write. That is not going to happen in the
current GRASS roadmap / development plan... that is more what Thierry
Laronde is doing with KerGIS ( http://www.kergis.com/ ). What will happen I
think is that when 5.4 stable is finally released, all developers' write
access to the grass CVS tree will be withdrawn and everyone will have to
work on 5.7.

Hope this clarifies things a bit although it probably raises more
questions :)

Paul