I think it is great that we now have a completely working binary distribution for GRASS 5.0.3 under Cygwin. Many thanks to Rich and Glynn! I and my students thank you and others ought to do so too.
I agree with Hamish that having complete and functional binaries is essential for wider GRASS use--leading hopefully also to wider participation in GRASS development and maintenance. We don't want people to download this software, start it up and find that important parts don't work.
However, that said, I also think that with the successful efforts to get the last of the major disfunctions corrected in 5.0.3 (mainly PNG and NVIZ under Cygwin), it should be +/- frozen and any future work should concentrate on getting out a stable release of 5.3 with binaries. It sounds like we are very close to this now. There are just a few items to clean up, albeit some are fairly important. Richard and Glynn seem to have a binary of 5.3 that works well. Scott Mitchell and Lorenzo Moretti have very solid versions of 5.3 for Mac OSX. I don't know the status under Linux.
FWIW, I've been using 5.3 a lot recently on the Mac and have only run into one bug and one feature that doesn't work quite like it's supposed to. I just hit them this weekend and will report them shortly.
I would like echo Markus' call for getting out a stable release of 5.3. The recent discussion about getting this into the upcoming debian release makes this even more urgent. IMHO, 5.3--not 5.0.x--is the 'stable' GRASS that most people should be using while GRASS 6 is moving toward release. It is the version that should be included in Knoppix.
Markus is trying to focus on the heavy lifting needed to move GRASS 6 forward and needs help in getting a stable 5.3 out the door. Unfortuately, I don't understand the technical details of managing a CVS branch. However, if someone does, it would be great if they could oversee the release of GRASS 5.3.
Michael Barton
On Sunday, March 21, 2004, at 04:01 AM, grass5-request@grass.itc.it wrote:
I have ftp'd a complete Cygwin 5.0.3 binary distribution to
grass.itc.it/incoming which includes a working Nviz, fftw, and PNG
driver. If you could replace the current files with these then I
think it will make things easier for new Cygwin users.Not to disparage your efforts but especially in light of Markus'
recent e-mail I feel we should not be promoting 5.0.x any more and a
5.3 binary distribution would be much more useful and beneficial. I am
only saying this because I recall you said you have produced such a
distribution. There really is no point in pushing 5.0 any longer IMHO.On the other hand, we now have (hopefully/finally) a solid and full
version of the stable version of GRASS for the most demanded (binary)
platform. With that done and out of the way we can now focus on the
future. A 5.3 binary would be great, but for now thanks to Rich and
Glynn for getting this done.We should remember that most people using Cygwin would never dream of
building anything from source, it's a bit of a foreign concept on the
PC, so Cygwin binaries represent an important public face for GRASS.I guess my point is we should be promoting this 5.0.3 binary until such
point as we have an equally solid 5.3 binary. As 5.3 is a moving target,
colaboration, like that which got Rich's binary done, isn't as easy.regards,
Hamish
______________________________
Michael Barton, Professor & Curator
Department of Anthropology
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2402
USA
voice: 480-965-6262; fax: 480-965-7671