[Bioperl-l] bioperl-dev or branch?

[Hilmar Lapp]

On May 21, 2009, at 10:02 PM, Mark A. Jensen wrote:

> Also wanted to chime in briefly here--for me as a new developer,  
> commit
> access to The Trunk is a little scary, but bioperl-dev seems friendly,
> so I find I'm more comfortable putting my hare-brained schemes there
> where I know I won't break anything, but experienced folks can  
> monitor,
> comment, ignore, get excited, emit raspberries, etc. the whole time.

Yeah I understand that but what you are describing is a branch,  
really. Bioperl-dev as a subset of BioPerl may also be updated  
frequently by other people, so unless you want only useless and/or  
outright dangerous stuff there (which if I understand correctly runs  
counter to what Chris has in mind) there is no reason to expect that  
no-one will be using that.

It's simply stuff whose API hasn't stabilized yet to the extent  
desirable for being moved to -core or -tools. (Chris chime in if I am  
misrepresenting this)

In theory, branches are cheap in svn (in practice, that's not  
necessarily so in a local checkout, but we're still only talking about  
required storage), and you should feel free to open one at any time.  
If people find branching off in bioperl too expensive then that's  
another argument to really look into git.

On May 21, 2009, at 9:51 PM, Mark A. Jensen wrote:

> For Chase's project, e.g., there may be mods that need to take place  
> (or be tried out, and possibly discarded later, which is key) in the  
> core modules, to interface the new stuff with the core. So  
> experiments may occasionally depend on (possibly radical) changes to  
> the core--nasty for folks (I expect they are many) that update on  
> the core regularly and expect changes there to be incremental fixes  
> and/or new and relatively well-tested functionality.

You should really branch off the core for this. BTW in subversion it  
is up to you what you put on a branch. You can copy the entire code  
tree, or only a small part of it.

So I find it pretty important that we get the distinction between  
bioperl-dev and a branch (of bioperl-dev or of bioperl-live) down as  
unambiguously as possible.

	-hilmar
-- 
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:-  hlapp at gmx dot net :
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