Hello Markus

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007, Markus Neteler wrote:

Dear PSC,

we should decide (or give a recommendation to the
developers team) about the migration from CVS to SVN.
This is currently holding the start of GRASS 7 development.

I would say not necessarily - a release branch could be created for the next stable release and then the major changes for 7 made in the CVS HEAD. But I think what we more or less decided in the last discussion was that we would use the move to SVN as a "crutch" to aid the 6.x/7.x development split. So in that sense you're right. As long as we all understand the implications of that (especially with regard to where to make bug fixes and where to add new development) then I think it will actually be a good help.

Essentially, all want to migrate to SVN for various
advantages already discussed. But we have to define
where the hosting will take place. Currently there
are two offers:

- SVN with GForge at Intevation in Germany
- SVN with Trac and Wiki at OSGeo.org
(out of interest - where is the OSGeo SVN server physically located and who is the sysadmin for it?)

I think (as Helena initially suggested in the last discussion) we should move to the OSGeo infrastructure, primarily for the social/shared support benefits Frank outlines. I just think we have to be clear that we're not proposing leaving Intevation because of any deficiencies with the infrastructure there - I can only say it's been amazingly reliable for years with almost no downtime at all and to my knowledge never a bug or an issue to report. Bernhard has always been there when needed to sort out any queries with access to the CVS server. He's been about for a while now and as far as I can make out from the mailing list archives was one of the major influences in actually having GRASS released under the GPL, and I think we owe him a lot of thanks for all his support of GRASS.

I wonder is it reasonable to expect Intevation to continue to support our old CVS repositories (grass, grass6, web, libgrass - are there any others) when we move the latest developments to a new infrastructure - perhaps we should simply move the whole thing to SVN? I don't know if they have any other projects using their CVS server - they might wish to close it down once we leave, to reduce the maintenance/support effort of maintaining it. This is where I have slight reservations about the idea of using the move to SVN as a split-point in 6.x/7.x development: are we going to simply copy the grass7 repository in its entirety and rename it something like grass7? Or are we going to subtly modify the files and then reimport them into grass7. I'm not quite sure what's the plan and this certainly needs to be ironed out.

As to the other benefits of the OSGeo infrastructure (apart from community/social integration with the other projects), if the bug tracker / repository integration works out well then that would be a nice added bonus. I have to say the way you couldn't Cc e-mail discussions into the Gforge bug tracker like you could with the old RT one was a big downside to using it more for me - I wonder does Trac have that capability?

Paul

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