[schooltool-dev] Merging of srichter's hierarchical term branch into trunk

[Ignas Mikalajunas]

  Hello, I have looked at the srichter-term-gradebook-work2 branch,
and tried merging it into trunk. It is doable, and would save me at
least some time as it has school year objects that i can reuse doing
school-year transition implemented. The downside of this is the
disruptivness of the code that is in that branch:

It will probably break CanDo.
It will invalidate quite a lot of gradebook work that jelkners
students just did. As the branch contains a lot of changes to the
gradebook. A lot of srichter's changes are related to grading periods.
It will surely break jacqmain plugin.
It will surely break lyceum plugin. (though i can handle that)
Keeping databases backwards compatible will be difficult, as
converting a flat list of terms into a hierarchy of school-years is
something that can't be done automatically in a reliable manner.
And it might negatively impact stability of the upcoming release.

On the other hand - if we won't do it now, it will only get more
difficult in the future. Especially if i will start working on a
different school-year functionality.

I know I can survive the impact, all i will have to do is update
lyceum import scripts, and some gradebook code, which is not being
used at this very moment, so i won't have any data to migrate. Thus
it's mostly whether you want me to perform the merge, or not.

Ignas