[Biocorba-l] Database versioning

[Alan Robinson]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Ewan Birney wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Brad Chapman wrote:
> 
> > Alan:
> > > Btw, the version number of a database - should it be a 'string' or an
> > > 'integer'??? Currently, it's the latter - But I'm now not so sure if
> > > that's appropriate...
> 
> I am a big believe that version numbers should be integers such that you
> know that if you have version 1 and version 2 you should look at version
> 2.

I agree absolutely - Unfortunately, the reality doesn't appear to be like
that. The GenBank and EMBL databases are well behaved in this respect.  
But, for example, what versioning would you use on Ensembl? I know the
current setup for the software/data is described as "Ensembl 0.7.5 with
the September 5th dataset". Is there a database version stored somewhere
else?


(N.B. There is a get out clause in the IDL documentation that states if
the version is unspecified, then the latest version is to be returned).


Alan.