[GRASS-user] Re: setting up GRASS svn

[Markus Neteler]

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 5:44 AM, Shane Litherland
<litherland-farm at bigpond.com> wrote:
> Hi Markus and mailing list;
>
> I tackled the svn setup today. after several hrs of web browsing,
> uninstalling old versions, and trying a few approaches to svn commands,
> I think I have succeeded. the 'info' under GRASS "HELP>ABOUT GRASS GIS"
> now shows I have 'GRASS GIS 6.4.2svn50340 (2012)

Excellent, congrats.

> A couple of hurdles I had on the way... simply following your initial
> instruction of:
>
>> If you compile yourself, consider to switch to the 6.4.x release branch
>> version (stable), which continuously receives bugfixes, using
>> the command:
>>
>> svn checkout https://svn.osgeo.org/grass/grass/branches/releasebranch_6_4
>> grass64_release
>
> did something in a terminal,

It downloads the source code to your local disk.

> seemed to indicate there were a lot of bits
> to update to my existing 6.4.2RC2. But I don't think that command by
> itself did anything to my GRASS version?

You needed to execute it in a fresh/empty directory. If you did so in
an existing tree, you have a source code version mixture now. Better
to fetch it again.

> I tried running above, then doing 'configure' (with several custom
> settings) and 'make' and 'checkinstall' which kept the computer busy for
> awhile,

Yes, "make" does the compilation, i.e. "convert" the source code into
a binary code which is machine readable.

> but still didn't seem to change my GRASS install... still
> 6.4.2RC2 (2011) but not a svn version and not 2012??

Yes, because you likely missed the installation step:
make install

Note that this may require administrator (root) password or you have to
do (depends on your distro):
sudo make install

> After doing this, re-running 'svn update' suggested it was current, but
> the GRASS program itself told me something else??

Yes (see above).

> I ended up following tips from
> http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Working_with_SVN
>
> i.e. first downloading and installing an svn snapshot. This web page was
> the only place I found that gave any clear info on how to start off with
> svn versions.

Please tell us which places are *not* clear so that we can fix them.

> I noted in the INSTALL files the process of updating svn was more
> similar to this website than to Markus' tip above... but the install
> file is dated July 2010. Is 'svn checkout' a newer option?

Certainly we do not touch every file in every release unless a
file update is needed. If needed, please speak up.

To get updates now, just run in that source code directory:
svn update  # this fetches updates
make
make install # as root or with sudo

Cheers
Markus