[Biopython-dev] Developmental and experimental branches

[Giovanni Marco Dall'Olio]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Peter <biopython at maubp.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Giovanni Marco Dall'Olio
> <dalloliogm at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:18 PM, Bruce Southey <bsouthey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> In a previous thread (and indicated in others) it was suggested that perhaps
>>> Biopython needs some type of development  or experimental branch. So this
>>> thread is orientated to provide some discussion on this and considers that
>>> Biopython has moved to SVN.
>>
>> Maybe you can consider the approach at the basis of git, in which
>> every developer works on its personal branch, and the owner of the
>> 'official branch' can decide whether to accept the changes apported by
>> the single branches or not.
>
> In some ways this describes the current situation but without the
> software: The CVS/SVN repository is the master official branch which
> we (as a group) try and keep pretty stable.  When working on new
> modules, individual developers or contributors have hacked away on
> their own machines (perhaps using a local repository - I tended to
> just save versioned snapshots of work in progress), and commit things
> to the master once it was sufficiently stable to be approved.  For
> self contained modules, this works OK - although using something like
> git would be a bit more formalised and automated, and allow this kind
> of "work in progress" to be done openly.

just a note: since I was trying to simplify the concept, I said
something which is not particularly correct.
In git, you are not needed to have a central repository. Everyone has
its personal branch and there is not such thing as an 'official
branch', unless it is defined by convention.

For example, look at this graph:
- http://github.com/blog/39-say-hello-to-the-network-graph-visualizer
on March 6th someone has created a fork to work on a mysql support,
which has not been merged in the ufficial branch yet.

There are many other forks, too: which one is the official?
The answer is none of them, but if the authors wanted, they could have
created a repository and decided that it was the official one, and
kept it up to date.


>
> Peter
>



-- 

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