[Bioperl-l] Splitting Bioperl

[Chris Fields]

I think what's partially responsible for slowing down releases is the  
expectation that each dev release is supposed to have all bugs fixed,  
work for every OS, etc.  In other words, act like a stable release.

A developer release by nature is living on the edge, so why not have  
regular dev releases?  We keep telling users to update to using  
bioperl-live whenever something breaks, anyway.  We could decide to  
split stuff off along the way into more 'stable' sections if there  
were more demand for it, and have the more API-volatile code  
(DB::SeqFeature, EUtilities, GFF3, Chado-related, etc.) retain the  
'dev' tag until we feel it's ready for prime time.

chris

On Jul 4, 2007, at 2:45 PM, Jason Stajich wrote:

> I definitely agree - we can live up to the unstable "living on the
> edge" nature of dev releases a bit more perhaps?
>
>
> On Jul 4, 2007, at 11:37 AM, David Messina wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jul 4, 2007, at 9:53 AM, Chris Fields wrote:
>>
>>>  we start having fixed,
>>> regularly timed dev releases like Parrot, monthly or bimonthly  
>>> (quite
>>> common on CPAN), with brief release reports on which bugs have been
>>> fixed, code has been added, so on.  Not every bug has to be fixed  
>>> per
>>> dev release; if that were true there would never be releases for  
>>> some
>>> of the XML parser packages.  No RCs for dev releases (it's a dev
>>> release!).  These would be 1.x.y.  We can then, every once in a
>>> while, have a bug-squashing session, hackathon, etc, and have  
>>> regular
>>> non-dev release (1.x) that all core devs accept and that passes a
>>> particular milestone.
>>
>>
>> Regardless of whether we split or don't, I think these ideas of
>> adding a little more structure to BioPerl's development cycles --
>> especially having bug-squashing and hacking sessions, where we all
>> band together and commit some time to cranking through a bunch of to-
>> dos -- would be beneficial, particularly as a means to keeping a
>> certain basal level of momentum in BioPerl.
>>
>> Dave
>>
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>
> --
> Jason Stajich
> jason at bioperl.org
> http://jason.open-bio.org/
>
>
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Christopher Fields
Postdoctoral Researcher
Lab of Dr. Robert Switzer
Dept of Biochemistry
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign