[GRASS-dev] stability of GRASS 7?

____________________
C. Michael Barton
Director, Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Professor of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Arizona State University

voice: 480-965-6262 (SHESC), 480-727-9746 (CSDC)
fax: 480-965-7671 (SHESC), 480-727-0709 (CSDC)
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton, http://csdc.asu.edu

Currently,

The file formats have not changed in such a way for this to be a problem. IIRC, the vector indexing protocols have changed in GRASS7, but this is more of a problem going from 6 to 7 than going the other way.

Raster formats currently remain compatible. There has been discussion about changing these, but this has not happened yet.

Michael

On Aug 2, 2010, at 9:00 AM, <grass-dev-request@lists.osgeo.org> wrote:

Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 12:46:54 +0200
From: Nikos Alexandris <nikos.alexandris@felis.uni-freiburg.de>
Subject: Re: [GRASS-dev] stability of GRASS 7?
To: grass-dev@lists.osgeo.org
Cc: Tim Michelsen <timmichelsen@gmx-topmail.de>
Message-ID:
  <201008021246.55193.nikos.alexandris@felis.uni-freiburg.de>
Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

(this did not hit the list previously)

Tim wrote:

do I have to expect data damage when opening GRASS6
locations with the current trunk?

Hamish:

we hope not, but do not guarantee it. (ability to break backwards
compatibility lets us develop faster and in new directions, the
whole point of a new major version)

Can I use GRASS 7 and then afterwards GRASS 6 again on the
same location?

for now.

do not use development versions for production work. If there
is a particular new feature which you just can't live without,
consider putting in a request to have it backported (small things
only)

Something to add in the discussion:

I think it is not a question of "is it going to happen that someone curious
opens 6x-mapsets with grass7x for real work, but _when_".

And when it happens, will there be (at least) some kind of warning
(mechanism!)? Or/and maybe a major "spread the news" action (in ML's, GRASS-
related feeds)?

Thanks, Nikos