[BioRuby] Are the Bio* projects dying?

[Peter Cock]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public14 at thebird.nl> wrote:
> When I check the # of commits to BioRuby, BioPerl, BioPython, I notice
> the projects are not very active (to put it mildly). ...

What is your benchmark? What are you comparing them against?

For Biopython we're getting pull requests from new contributors fairly
regularly - although the list of new contributors for the Biopython 1.61
is inflated as it is a bit overdue compared to our normal release schedule:
https://github.com/biopython/biopython/blob/master/NEWS

> But, what does this really mean for the Bio* projects as a whole? What
> happened to new blood? What should we do?

Make more effort for Google Summer of Code across the Bio* projects
for 2013 (although I thought BioRuby and Biopython did quite well last
year)? That seems to have been a good way to get new blood.

Some of the more senior contributors may be in a position to encourage
or direct PhD students to look at contributing to relevant Bio* projects
(or other science OSS projects). That seems a good idea to me at least.

Regards,

Peter

P.S. Did you mean to send this just to the BioRuby list? If you want a
cross project discussion perhaps open-bio-l would be better?
http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bio-l