Re: [DebianGIS] A possible Grass policy for lenny+1
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 02:06:06AM -0800, Hamish wrote:
> Francesco wrote:
> > I'm going to revamp the grass package in order to support
> > multi-versioning as follows:
> >
> > grass binaries will be released as
> >
> > grass62
> > grass63
> > grass64
> > ...
> >
> > all of them will be installable at the same time by using versioned
> > paths (/usr/lib/grass62, grass63.1 etc.).
>
>
> Honestly, I think that is totally unnecessary work, a dilution of dev
> effort for no gain, and introducing dangerous new complication.
>
I was not saying we/me have the idea of supporting all of them :)
That is simply a way to allow the use/support of more than one version
without having to deinstall anything. The idea is having a decoupling
of the stable release in regards to its version. At the time
of releasing a new stable one has to update only the virtual
package. Currently we will have to change paths by hand to
work consistently. And what complication are you pointing?
Now we have to manage by hand all paths in 6.2, 6.3 and possibly
6.4, as is visible on the svn repo. That's quite annoying and
error prone. Templating for versioning would allow at least
to manage paths automagically and one could concentrate
only on managing new depedencies and patches which are always different
among versions.
>
> * 6.4.0 will be the next stable in the next few months and 6.2 will be
> far obsolete. QGIS 1.0 will be built against on 6.4.0. By the time
> lenny+1 is released we should be well past a 6.4.1 bugfix release.
> There are still some things to do, but we are getting the release
> announcement for 6.4.0rc1 ready now. 6.4.0 in Testing for most of
> lenny+1 growth time means a stronger 6.4.1 in lenny+1-Stable.
>
> * while 6.3.0 is officially a development release, it is very bug free
> and fully capable of being "grass" in Debian's stable branch. As it is
> now, 6.2.3 could&should be fully replaced by it for "production use".
>
> * Once you have 6.3.0 installed there is zero reason to keep 6.2.3 around
> * Once you have 6.4.0 installed there is no reason to keep 6.3.0 or 6.2.3
> !!!
>
> This is because grass is fully forwards compatible at the 6.x level.
>
I would say roughly compatible. I have scripts that work under 6.3 but
needs changes to work under 6.2 and viceversa because command line
back-compatility is not always respected, some commands become obsolete, etc.
New versions could introduce new problems and people could be interested
in maintaining their current version in use for legacy scripts.
Note that my proposal is not depending on the _current_ roadmap, but adequate
for _any_ prospective roadmap and change in grass release management.
With current situation one HAS to upgrade. With the
proposed one one can maintain an old version and use a new one
at the same time without problems. The idea is allowing people to
create packages for 6.any independently and manage only a virtual
package to define what should be considered the default one.
> older minor versions are really only interesting for developers to search
> for when some change was introduced.
>
>
> There is some sense in allowing grass6 + grass7 packages on the same
> system to run grass6 specific scripts/addons. But I rather doubt grass7
> will be ready for lenny+1.
>
I would not so sure, with our current prospective release times :-/
--
Francesco P. Lovergine
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