pcb-rnd release policy

• we try to make releases rock solid, so if you use an official release, that should have no major bug or regression compared to the last one
• relases are collected in svn in the /tags directory (as recommended by the svn book); you could do an "svn ls svn://repo.hu/pcb-rnd/tags" to see what versions we have and check out one. The last few release tarballs are also available on the web.
• svn /trunk is always the latest "development snapshot", might be unstable or buggy and may have temporary regressions; although I try to carry out even largish refactorings in a series of working intermediate commits, the code base is so huge that I sometime miss newly introduced bugs (like this gerber layer name thing). I am working on improving the automated test system to make it easier to catch these (user help needed on this!)
• I try to maintain predefined, public release timeline so users can follow the process and know what to expect from trunk/; I try to do restrict myself to do the refactoring/cleaning in the first 1/3 of a development cycle and keep the last 1/3 for minor bugfixes so we have time to test out the changes before we release. You can find the timeline at http://repo.hu/projects/pcb-rnd under the timeline menu.

dual-version installs

A good strategy for dual-version is to install the last release (either from svn tags or from a tarball release) and keep trunk/ uninstalled. You can always run trunk from source:

cd trunk/src
./pcb-rnd

to test the latest/greatest feature while if you start pcb-rnd from anywhere else you get the latest stable. It's also a good idea to configure the trunk/ version with --debug while keep the stable version in production settings, for speed - debug slows polygons a lot.