[Bioperl-l] Need CPAN release to clear up CPANtesters test failure reports

[James E Keenan]

On 05/26/2016 08:47 PM, James E Keenan wrote:
> On 05/16/2016 09:52 AM, Fields, Christopher J wrote:
>> Thanks Jim!  We can work on pushing out a new release.
>>
>> One of the long-term problems with BioPerl is the large size of the
>> distribution; we’ve been considering a new 1.7x series to deal with
>> this, but it’s clearly slowed down over the years.  Maybe this will
>> help stimulate that effort again.
>>
>> chris
>>
>>> On May 15, 2016, at 6:41 PM, James E Keenan <jkeen at verizon.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> [snip]
>
>>> Your last CPAN release was in July 2014.  I strongly advise that you
>>> do a CPAN release of BioPerl ASAP so that your project does not
>>> suffer reputational damage from all those test failure reports.  At
>>> the same time, I urge you to go through the bug reports at
>>> https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=BioPerl.  It's
>>> likely that HEAD on github resolves some of these.
>>>
>>> Thank you very much.
>>> Jim Keenan
>
> I'd like to follow up on my recommendation that you try to get a new
> CPAN release of BioPerl out soon.
>
> The major North American Perl conference, The Perl
> Conference/YAPC::NA::2016, will be held in Orlando, FL, starting just 26
> days from now.
>
> http://www.yapcna.org/yn2016/
>
> A CPAN release before YAPC would be a strong shot in the arm for the
> visibility of BioPerl within the larger Perl community.  Apart from the
> fact that there are software engineers who work in the biomedical
> sciences who frequently attend YAPC, there are also Perl people (like
> myself) who are in a position to submit patches and pull requests simply
> for the purpose of improving the quality of the Perl code.  But people
> in the latter category are unlikely to contribute patches unless they
> think that there is a realistic chance of the code's being released to
> CPAN.
>
> So, please take advantage of this time-limited opportunity.
>

Unfortunately, this opportunity was not seized.  YAPC::NA::2016 -- now 
re-branded as The Perl Conference 2016 -- has come and gone.  During the 
Pull Request Challenge which was part of the conference, I did create 
one p.r. against BioPerl, which I'm glad to say has been accepted. 
However, we would have been in a better position to advocate for 
non-bio-focused Perl programmers to help with BioPerl if we had had an 
up-to-date CPAN release.

(By the way, I heard two presentations at the conference that dealt with 
genomic data.)

Since AFAICT your github 'master' branch is passing all tests, I would 
urge you to simply increment the $VERSION numbers by .001 throughout and 
upload to CPAN.  After that's done, you can discuss whether or not you 
want to call the next version 1.6 or not.

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan