[Phylobase-devl] release date

[François Michonneau]

Hi,

  I think we should still plan of releasing it. My main concern is that
if we don't, we won't keep the pace we have been having in the last
couple of weeks, and the official release will be delayed. If people do
start using it, then they will report bugs (not too many I hope) and
keep development going.

  However, I agree there is still some polishing to do before officially
releasing it. It would be valuable to identify what are the things that
we really need to change before the release. In my opinion, one of main
things is that we need to use consistent variable names for
phylo4/phylo4d in our functions. They are currently called: x, phy,
object, etc. I can imagine that it's confusing for new users reading the
documentation. This is important to do before the release because if we
harmonize these names in the future, we can break people code if they
use explicit variable names in their calls.
 
  I agree that it would be nice to have our own subsetting and rerooting
functions. At this stage, however, it seems to me OK to release
phylobase even if these 2 functions don't work. Most other aspects of
phylobase are functional and should allow people to start working with
it.

  Because these functions don't work and yet are important, we should
however probably release phylobase as a beta-1 version. Meanwhile, we
should think about a road map with our objectives for the future
releases. I propose that we use the 0.4 release series as beta, and have
0.5 series as the first official release.

* beta-2 (0.4.2): non-unique labels, subsetting, rerooting
* beta-3 (0.4.3): methods for multiPhylo4 and multiPhylo4d, no
dependencies from APE, identify method
* rc-1 (0.4.4): all functions have RUnit tests
* rc-2 (0.4.5): complete documentation and vignettes

  Alternatively, if we decide to not release quite yet on CRAN, we can
just send out announcements to the R-phylo mailing list and ask people
to test phylobase (from R-forge) and get their feedback.

  Cheers,
  -- François


On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 23:00 -0700, Peter D. Cowan wrote:
> This might be verboten to even suggest, but should we push off the release date?  In the last month we've made a 150 commits to phylobase, that's pretty awesome.  If we can keep up even a portion of this momentum, it may be worth while to hold off on releasing the package until we can finish a few things off.  Or, if we don't see ourselves having time at the moment, we can release as planned on Friday, and address the issues we've identified in a "Known Issues" section, and try to organize a 0.5.1 release down the road.
> 
> Top on my list would be replacing our two ape dependencies.  The rerooting and subsetting are not trivial things to write, but the process of calling out to ape seems not to work the way we had hoped.  Unfortunately, I won't have time to do this until next week sometime.  
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Peter
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