On 07/22/2014 06:17 PM, Vincent Carey wrote:
On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 7:10 PM, Andrzej OleÅ› <andrzej.o...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Dan, Michael, Julian,
Thank's for keeping the links to the tarballs!
I don't argue that mixing release and devel is a good idea in general.
Rather, that for some users this might be the best compromise between
the following two objectives:
1. a stable working environment
2. the possibility to use or just quickly check a specific new feature
available in the devel version of package X
IMHO this is the road to ruin.
Switching entirely to devel is quite often a no-no for them because of
the unstable nature of the devel branch. And maintaining both release
I personally have never done the homework required to have
both branches on hand with convenient updating. It is
surely feasible and I would imagine a number of folks reading this have
done it for themselves. It is probably not trivial to do it portably but a
doc
with suggestions for key platforms would be a nice contribution. I used
to have Rrel and Rdev scripts that made it work and that is easily worked
out but it is not very elegant and transitioning to new releases of R is
laborious.
FWIW one approach _is_ (well ok, sufficiently obscure to be not) documented at
http://bioconductor.org/developers/how-to/useDevel/
but it is commented out so only appears in the source version of the page;
apparently it was more confusing than helpful, and the approach changes
depending on whether Bioc devel is on R devel or not.
Martin
and devel only adds to their frustration. As a developer I would like
to have the freedom to advise people on using the latest devel version
of my package regardless of whether they are running release or devel
if I think that this is safe for them, which is typically the case for
many upstream packages without (many) reverse dependencies. I don't
see the point of unnecessary obstructing this approach and I'm not
sure I understand why there is such an outrage about mixing release
and devel. In contrary, quite often this can be much safer than
Depends on your definition of safety. I think that we have gained much
from the clean separation, in terms of user support effort and freedom to
experiment in devel. "Experts" can do what they like and deal with the
consequences themselves, but the general approach to the user community
should be principled and it should be: 1) in general, use release branch and
report bugs and see that they are fixed in a timely way; if they are not,
let
the core know -- 2) if you expect help, do all package installations via
biocLite() --
3) we like seeing mileage on the devel branch and encourage its use for
novel features, but it needs to be used with the appropriate version of R
and the
devel package set.
switching between BioC branches. I personally do not want to find
myself in a position when I advice a user to switch to BioC devel
because of some new function from my package he/she would like to give
This is an engineering commitment to a stable release branch. No new
features,
only bug fixes. We have benefited from this immensely.
a try only to learn that this broke his/hers scripts (due to the
changes in some other packages).
To sum up, I believe that mixing release and devel might be beneficial
in some specific cases similar to the above described one and it's
important that the infrastructure allows leveraging this approach,
e.g. by providing direct access to devel tarballs.
Cheers,
Andrzej
On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 11:12 PM, Julian Gehring <julian.gehr...@embl.de>
wrote:
Hi Andzrej,
thank you, I see your point but I'm afraid I must disagree with you.
I've had this situation numerous times that I have added/fixed
something in the devel branch of a package and had to advice the users
to use this latest version. Needless to say, they were typically using
the release branch, and it was a relatively painless procedure for
them to pick the tarball from the devel landing page and proceed with
manual installation. Of course, this could be also achieved by
installing from the svn, however, this is not very welcome from the
user's perspective.
I'm not sure I understand to need to mix devel and release. If there is
a
bug in the release branch, it should be also patched there. And if users
need the features of the devel branch, they would have to switch to devel
anyway.
Best
Julian
_______________________________________________
Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
_______________________________________________
Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
--
Computational Biology / Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N.
PO Box 19024 Seattle, WA 98109
Location: Arnold Building M1 B861
Phone: (206) 667-2793
_______________________________________________
Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
