[Biopython-dev] Dropping the plain text BLAST parser?, was: Jython 2.7b2

[Wibowo Arindrarto]

Hi Peter, Chris,

> It might be best described as ‘needing to be euthanized’.  We don’t actively support it but ‘patches are welcome’ (e.g. we don’t actively fix bugs for it).

With regards to the parser, I think this is a more sensible approach:
We relieve our codebase from updates to make the parser compatible
with recent BLAST releases (AFAIK the text parser works with versions
up to 2.2.26+). If NCBI decides to make minimum change after 2.2.26+,
then the parser could still be useful in some cases. We can add a
warning as well if needed (both in the code and the tutorial / docs),
to make sure users know that blast text parsing is less preferred than
XML or tabular.

The code is still functional and useful anyway :).

Best,
Bow