[ghemical-devel] Re: about versions and organizing tasks

[Donald Ephraim Curtis]

So I suppose I should chime in on some of this stuff.

I'd be willing to help with ghemical as much as possible, but it is 
still kinda at the will of my funding as to what i'm working on.  as of 
right now most of it has been ghemical with regards to gamess, but i can 
easily see this work forcusing on openbabel updates in the near future 
(all towards gamess again) but it's not to say i don't want/won't have 
ideas and extensions to ghemical also.  But be assured, i'm not running 
and gunning on changes, running them by the devel group is within my 
best interests.

as far as versioning, I should say this.  when 2.0 (VERSION_2_BRANCH) is 
released, it's released, we leave the branch, but all development should 
focus on 3.0 (HEAD).  branches should be primarily for bug fixes.  if 
2.0 isn't done then lets get it done (easier said than done).  and in 
fact, if it isn't done, then there is no reason there should BE a HEAD. 
  it seems like jumping the gun and splitting our efforts between 
developing for VERSION_2_BRANCH _and_ HEAD is working at half 
efficiency.  (saying this, i haven't looked at HEAD yet, i'll do that 
later today).

Geoff is right though, the easiest thing would be to say what goals we 
have, what that will require and what branch it should go into.

any chance ghemical will move to SVN sometime?  it's pretty CVS friendly 
and it's SO much nicer.


don't take what i say too forcefull, trying to be quick and concise can 
sound pretty rough when opinions start to fly.

-Donald


Geoffrey Hutchison wrote:
> 
> On Apr 4, 2006, at 4:51 AM, Tommi Hassinen wrote:
> 
>> So, my idea is that you could freely do the changes you like to the  
>> VERSION_2_BRANCH, and then we release it as v2.0 when you think  it's 
>> ready. I'm focusing on HEAD version, and try to do tasks that  help us 
>> longer term. Since VERSION_2_BRANCH and HEAD look the same  from the 
>> user's perspective, we can later release HEAD as v2.10 or  v2.20 when 
>> the time is right.
> 
> 
> Well, I'm certainly willing to "take over" for v2.0. If Donald would  
> like to join me, great!
> 
> One thing I'd like to do is make a VERSION_2_BRANCH for libghemical  
> too. I know Tommi assures me that libghemical HEAD won't break  things, 
> but I think it's safer and can let Tommi and others change  libghemical 
> HEAD without worrying about breaking things.
> 
> I'd also like to suggest that we add Donald as a member of the  project 
> at bioinformatics.org so that he has CVS write access -- he  won't have 
> to constantly send patches to the list. :-)
> 
>> Let's just solve the issues like Å/nm and configuration dialog so  
>> that the version jump would be as small as possible.
> 
> 
> I don't think a version jump matters much. Many users seem to think  
> 1.0x is the current release, so I personally don't think it matters  
> whether HEAD becomes 2.1 or 3.0 or Ghemical MegaServer 2008. (Ha!)
> 
> What I think is important is that we have some longer-term plans,  think 
> about what sorts of changes we'd like to make, and if needed to  make 
> branches before any sort of huge source changes. After all, the  next 
> few releases are likely to come from the VERSION_2_BRANCH, e.g.  2.0.0, 
> 2.0.1...
> 
> Cheers,
> -Geoff