[Mitgcm-support] MITgcm Tag conventions

[mitgcm-support at dev.mitgcm.org]

What is "checkpoint33-beta". Do we need it? The whole 
concept of checkpointNN is that checkpoints are beta?
We need people to think that way, otherwise we will
need to make the checkpoint process very ponderous
with months of testing. I don't want it to go that way.
Things that  are not beta are called releaseNN in the 
checkpoint tree. The development trees are for things 
that are pre-checkpoint and experimental.

I am still wedded to the idea of holding on to some discipline
in the checkpoint tree. I think arguments against it are
weak. The discipline of moving code from 
development tree((s) to the checkpoint tree is important to
ensure the integrity of whats in the checkpoint tree. It
forces people to think about what they are checking in and
to test it - in theory!!! Unfortunately that discipline has
to involve some human time, but without it we will just get chaos
like in the JPL CVS tree. ( Who gets these messages? ).

Chris