[GRASS-user] Install GRASS stable and experimental in parallel

[Moritz Lennert]

On 14/12/17 13:49, Markus Neteler wrote:
> Hi Stefan,
> 
> On Thu, Dec 14, 2017 at 1:26 PM, Stefan Blumentrath
> <Stefan.Blumentrath at nina.no> wrote:
>> Hi Markus,
>>
>> Many thanks for the swift reply and the clarification!
>>
>> Will think about website improvements and come back to you…
> 
> Great!
> 
>> I would assume, being able to have package based installations of test
>> versions in parallel to the current stable would make it easier for casual
>> testers or people interested in certain features of development versions to
>> get more involved in early testing in general…
>>
>> Meaning, if that is technically possible it could be a good thing to do, in
>> order to increase number of testers and early adopters… Just a thought…
> 
> It is there for many years :-) Called weekly binary snapshots. Or I
> don't get what you mean...

I think Stefan means distribution packages.

Theoretically this is possible. One could create a specific 
"grass-trunk" package which is packaged in a way to not conflict with 
the official stable grass version.

However, I think most distribution packagers are already very busy just 
handling the stable packages. The difficulty with creating such a 
grass-trunk package would be that it would have to be repackaged 
regularly (daily), but this means that whoever used it would have to 
have exactly the same versions of dependecy packages installed on their 
machine as on the package build machine.

And then, which distribution and which version of a distribution should 
we make packages for ?

In summary: if you are willing to create such a package against a 
clearly defined version of a distribution than this would be great, but 
I don't think you can count on either the core developers of GRASS, nor 
the packagers of different distributions for doing this.

Moritz