[GenABEL-dev] Design: Versions for filevector library, change symlinks

[L.C. Karssen]

Dear list,

As you may know I have been playing with the idea of creating filevector
(more specifically the fvlib directory) a separate library (see the
discussions at [1-3]). I also created a separate SVN branch to play
around with that idea. Basically this would mean that packages like
ProbABEL, DatABEL and VariABEL would get a dependency in the form of
what I call 'libfilevector'. Especially for the R packages in the
GenABEL suite this may not be very user-friendly because many of them
would not have admin rights (I assume) and therefore cannot simply
install operating system packages that contain libfilevector. Obviously
such a change to libfilevector would be a major one.

Apart from the discussions on the mailing list this topic came up again
a few weeks ago in a discussion with Maksim and Yurii. We discussed many
of the pros and cons (mostly revolving around user-friendliness vs.
technical advantages) and in the end we came up with the following:

Let's start to put versions on the filevector code. So far filevector
has never been released separately (always as part of the ABEL
packages). By putting a version number on the fv code and by making tags
of those releases in SVN we can solve several issues:
- It can be made clear which *ABEL package depends on which version of
the filevector code
- Improvements in the filevector code do not immediately affect the
'trunk' of the other packages
- This allows packages like ProbABEL to depend on a separate
libfilevector, whereas R packages can create a symlink to the tagged
code instead of filevector trunk (as is the present situation)

A final advantage may be that it becomes easier to treat filevector as
one of various file-format backends to the *ABELs. But this is something
I'll elaborate on in another e-mail to this list.


We would like to hear your opinions about this versioning of filevector
and tagging of these official filevector releases, as well as on the use
of symlinks to these tags by other packages (this may not be ideal, but
it solves the user-friendliness issue, while allowing the creation and
release of libfilevector).


Hope to hear from you!

Lennart.



[1]http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/genabel-devel/2013-July/000714.html
[2]
http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/genabel-devel/2013-November/000779.html
[2]
http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/genabel-devel/2013-November/000797.html

-- 
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L.C. Karssen
Utrecht
The Netherlands

lennart at karssen.org
http://blog.karssen.org
GPG key ID: A88F554A
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