[EMBOSS] broken links and other issues

[Peter Cock]

Hello Afif,

Peter Rice (BCC'd just in case of email list problems)
from EMBOSS had been looking at moving the repository
to GitHub (which would offer an alternative issue tracker,
and option for webpage hosting). However, I've not heard
from him about this for some time - and I presume that
sadly with the loss of BBSRC funding his time to spend
on EMBOSS is now very scare. I do sympathise.

As an occasional contributor to EMBOSS in the past, I
think moving to GitHub would be the best route forward
and open the door to making EMBOSS a community
maintained project.

EMBOSS is an Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF)
associated project, the other active OBF projects have
moved from CVS (sometimes via SVN) to git, so we
have some experience of this as a group. Ideally the
original EMBOSS team would be directly involved, but
ultimately under their open source licence it could be
done unilaterally.

Peter
(OBF treasurer, but speaking here in a personal capacity)



On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 10:39 PM, Afif Elghraoui <aelghraoui at sdsu.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was looking to submit a bug report and possibly a patch for isochore,
> but when I went to check the pulse of this project, I was almost led to
> conclude that it was dead. Here are the problems I and possibly others
> encountered.
>
> * The links to the mailing list archives are broken on these pages:
>
> http://emboss.sourceforge.net/support/
>
> http://emboss.open-bio.org/html/use/ch03s04.html
>
> * Users are offered the possibility to open bug reports or support
> requests on Sourceforge, but it seems that permission to do this is
> restricted to admins only. It's fine if you want to restrict this, but
> then I think the webpage should at least be corrected to not direct
> users there as a way to report issues.
>
> My experience basically was, seeing that the latest release of emboss is
> from a long time ago, to see whether the project was still active. The
> home page (on Sourceforge) says at the top that the most recent funding
> ended on Dec. 2011, the mailing list archives are broken links, and the
> most recent reported issues on Sourceforge are several years old. I then
> proceeded to search for active forks of emboss, when I started getting
> hits from the actual mailing list.
>
> Do you think this can be fixed? I consider these problems very severe.
>
> Many thanks and regards
>
> Afif
>
> --
> Afif Elghraoui
> Laboratory for Pathogenesis of Clinical Drug Resistance and Persistence
> San Diego State University
> Alvarado Medical Center
> 6367 Alvarado Court, Suite 206
> San Diego, CA 92120
> p. 858-222-0454
> http://tuberculosis.sdsu.edu
>
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