Re: Biology packages in FreeBSD
On Tue, 24 May 2005, Bill Pearson wrote:
But FASTA sometimes has bugs (which are usually rather subtle), at
As any software, right. We all know this by own experience. :-((
which point it is helpful for users to contact me. Genuine bugs are
Definitely. Your users mostly find the interesting bugs.
of great concern to me; I try to fix them within a week. My
experience with FASTA WWW sites is that users sometimes find a
problem, but do not tell me about it.
Great. I can assure you that Debian users are trained to report bugs
because they have the tools to do that simply. My entry point to
Debian was the WordNet dictionary. The authors of this project are
very thankful for the bug reports they got from Debian users. They
are perfectly sure that they would not have gotten this much bug
reports from users if it would not have been packaged for Debian.
If you are interested into this you might like to have a look at
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=wordnet&archive=yes
and
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=dict-wn&archive=yes
While not all bugs are upstream bugs but just caused by tha packaging
and interferences with other programs you might obtain that there is
a certain amount of bugs which were solved in Debian and reported back
to upstream. You might also note that they were first fixed in Debian
before the authors get a new version out (which is for sure depend from
the type of the project).
I like people to get the
program from me, so they can contact me about it.
By the way the tool popularity-contest gives you some feedback how
many users installed fasta (and how many of them use this regularly).
Often, the first thing I will do is suggest that they download a
current version of the program. That's a sensible suggestion if they
got the program from me originally, but can be quite confusing if it
came as part of a Linux distribution (does updating their Linux
distribution update FASTA?).
Sure. It needs only an
apt-get upgrade
and they are done. I'm keen on hearing what your users prefer:
wget; tar ; make ; make install
or just the simple call above.
Thus, I believe that scripts that download the current version of
FASTA, and databases (databases are available from ftp.ebi.ac.uk/ and
ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/) are more useful for most Bioinformatics users than
FASTA binaries.
OK, finally it is your decision and as I said we can nothing do about
it if we have no license. Our intention was to have a helping hand
to authors and users. If your conviction is that we can not help you
we have to trust you. But my advise would be to mention this in a
license statement.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
Reply to: