[Bioperl-l] Splitting Bioperl and Test related Suggestions

[David Messina]

On Jul 5, 2007, at 9:33 AM, Chris Fields wrote:
> I agree, but I think there is still an expectation that 1.5.2 and
> beyond are more like true 'stable' releases even though we still
> designate them as 'developer.'   We unfortunately reinforce that when
> we tell users they need to update to v. 1.5.2 or bioperl-live to fix
> a particular bug in the 1.4 release.

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.



> If we feel a nightly snapshot is warranted we could do that though.
> I personally don't think there is a need, particularly since we have
> several means to obtain the latest code at any point in time
> (including the browsable CVS 'Download tarball').  We could state the
> next dev/stable CPAN release (pending on date dd/mm/yy) will have the
> bug fix, and if they want it immediately then pick it up from CVS.

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