Historical notes

• Back in the old days of CVS, before Subversion, there were a couple times when major changes prompted us to fork the entire source tree; so along the way we had src/, src2/, and src3/. Now with Subversion, things are more flexible and easy to manage and so the old src/ and src2/ have been relegated to the saliency-archives, while the old src3/ has been renamed to just plain src/ once more.

• It all began with src/ -- not the current src/, but the now-obsolete original src/. It was active approximately between 1995 (not under version control) and late 2000, with minor compatibility updates throughout year 2001. When development in the old src/ began, support for C++ templates in g++ was incomplete, so the old src/ relied on simulated templates in which scripts were used to generate instantiations of source files from a generic source.

• src2/ is an obsolete source tree as well. The move from the old src/ to src2/ mainly involved switching the source tree to use bonafide C++ templates. NOTE that src2/ has now been moved out of the main subversion development tree, though it is still available in the saliency archives

• src3/ was the active source tree at the time of our CVS to Subversion transition (mid-2005). During 2001, Rob Peters and others started introducing a number of powerful new components to the toolkit, which generated sufficient incompatibility to warrant a move to a new source tree, src3/. In early 2003, some additional fairly large changes were introduced, but to avoid losing CVS history once again, we kept the code in src3/ rather than moving to src4. See here for notes on the changes in revision 3.1 relative to revision 3.0. NOTE: As of 2005-06-12 src3/ has been renamed back to just src/, now that we have the capability for cheap renaming within Subversion without losing revision history information.

---