[GRASS-user] Which version is advisable - SVN or stable

[Markus Neteler]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Chethan S <chethanuniversal at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings!
>
> I am a PG student using GRASS GIS and R for my dissertation work in Ubuntu
> 10.04. As of now in the ubuntugis PPA, GRASS 6.4.0 version rc6 version is
> available.

(... which is rather behind...)

> As I always want to use the latest stable version available and
> now since the stable version 6.4.0 is available, I have two options -
>
> Compile from source code which cannot be updated automatically.

Indeed it can - just launch
 svn up
in the source code tree.

> Using Weekly 6.4-svn snapshot which gives me the advantage of using the
> latest automatic updates

Or update from SVN as mentioned above.
When you are on the release branch, you will always pick the updates
(bugfixes). We do not submit anything which breaks existing installations.

> I am not able to decide upon which is suitable for me. I need a stable
> environment.

Same here. I use the release branch for the production and update it
regularly from SVN with "svn up".

Howto:
- get it the first time
     svn checkout
https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/branches/releasebranch_6_4
grass64_release
- get subsequent updates
     cd grass64_release/
     svn up


> In addition to this I also use R in combination with GRASS
> (spgrass6). Therefore it becomes essential that this interface should not
> break. Can anyone help me decide. I would be glad to know the advantages of
> one over other.

So get the release branch of 6.4 and things should work well.

Hope this helps
Markus

PS: I hope that UbuntuGIS folks catch up soon...