[GenABEL-dev] joining the GenABEL project - what is the procedure?

[L.C. Karssen]

Dear all,

It's been a while but this mail was still on my todo list. I agree with
Yurii that we should start establishing procedures for projects wanting
to join the GenABEL project umbrella. Software lifecycle management is
too often overlooked when developing a package and we don't want to
'degrade' the GenABEL project brand name by including packages that are
not maintained anymore after the initial paper is published. Or, another
argument I've come across: we make it open source so everyone can
contribute to it (and therefore it will 'somehow' be maintained without
us putting more effort into it). That's not how it works. The software
ecosystem in which a package lives is dynamic and a package should adapt
to that.

As Yurii wrote we discussed this at the EMGM conference and agreed that
code review should be part of it. This neatly ties into the discussion
we had on thils list some time ago about coding standards. This does not
mean we force everybody to use four spaces instead of eight when
indenting code, but more serious stuff like variables named "a" or "df"
are not helpful when someone wants to contribute or take over
maintenance of the package.

I've just committed the draft document of the coding standards to the
www folder of the SVN repo (rev. 1215). It's a (plain text) Org-mode
file; the HTML file is created from this Org file (using org-mode allows
us to easily export the text in various formats). Those of you who want
to convert without ever opening emacs can run the command
 emacs --batch --eval '(and (find-file "codingstyle.org")
(org-export-as-html nil))'
from the command line.

Looking forward to your comments, both on this e-mail and the coding
standards.


Lennart.

On 02-05-13 15:15, Yurii Aulchenko wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I have recently received several requests from people who would like to
> join to the GenABEL project with their software. Given this is a
> community-based project, neither me nor someone else is in a position to
> say 'yes' or 'no' - we need to develop some procedure how a software
> joins the project. 
> 
> We have discussed this with Nicola and Lennart during EMGM-2013, and we
> think that we do need a technical review as a part of the procedure
> (addressing the issues of license, clarity of the code, integration with
> other packages, etc.). We also need to think how we do maintenance: the
> suggestion would be to request that the author joins the forum and the
> list. If we see that a package is not actively maintained (e.g. we can
> not reach the maintainer), we should tag such a package as 'orphaned'. 
> 
> In many respects, we can base our procedure on the procedures developed
> by Bioconductor. In our procedures we need to achieve two conflicting
> goals: a) we do not want to repel potential contributors by a long list
> of technical requirements but at the same time b) in the sake of
> maintainability we need the code to comply to some requirements.
> Probably we should have 'minimal' and 'complete' requirements with
> packages clearly tagged on the web pages.
> 
> Let us know what you think. I will initiate a PiratPad document after
> having initial response from you. 
> 
> best regards,
> YA
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> genabel-devel mailing list
> genabel-devel at lists.r-forge.r-project.org
> https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/genabel-devel
> 

-- 
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L.C. Karssen
Utrecht
The Netherlands

lennart at karssen.org
http://blog.karssen.org

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