[Bioperl-l] Splitting Bioperl and Test related Suggestions

[Chris Fields]

On Jul 5, 2007, at 11:02 AM, David Messina wrote:

> ...
> I know this has been discussed before, but while we're talking  
> about future release plans, it might be worth revisiting the  
> BioPerl policy of designating only even-numbered releases as  
> 'stable'. It's taking so long to get from 1.4 to 1.6. While the  
> principle of keeping a stable API between 'stable' releases is  
> valid in the ideal case, I think that continuing to label 1.5.2 (or  
> whatever the latest 'dev' release is) as a developer release (which  
> implies potentially unstable or bleeding-edge code) is highly  
> misleading since we would never ever tell anyone to get 1.4 instead.
>
> Alternatively, if we adopt a more aggressive release schedule as  
> Chris proposed a couple days ago, then perhaps we could agree to  
> push out an even-numbered release once a year or so, so that there  
> is a 'stable' release we could recommend.

I think the idea of 'stable' is best summarized back in Hilmar's post  
(i.e. we support a particular API for that release).  The 1.5  
releases I believe break some aspects of 1.4 API (some of the Feature/ 
Annotation stuff introduced before the official 1.5 release).  We  
still need to address some of those issues before a 1.6 which seems  
to be the only real stumbling block, but they are unfortunately not  
well-documented and are somewhat interwoven with GMOD code.

> ...
> To make it easier for people to obtain the latest tarball, we could  
> put the 'download tarball' link directly on the 'Getting_BioPerl'  
> wiki page instead of only a link to the viewcvs interface. That way  
> they wouldn't have to navigate the source tree to figure out which  
> tarball they want (which is almost always going to be the bioperl- 
> live tarball).
>
> I think the actual URL underlying the 'Download tarball' link on  
> viewcvs is stable:
>
> 	http://code.open-bio.org/cgi/viewcvs.cgi/bioperl-live/bioperl- 
> live.tar.gz?tarball=1
>
> Dave

Sounds reasonable enough.  Do you want to do the honors?

chris