Re: Homepage of LibMems?
Hello again Andreas and debian-med,
Andreas Tille wrote:
On Sat, 16 Feb 2008, Aaron Darling wrote:
libMUSCLE is based on the MUSCLE aligner v3.6, and contains several
bugfixes and features not available in the main muscle distribution.
Muscle was released public domain, so libMUSCLE inherits a public
domain license.
Well, the license in principle permits this strategy. On the other hand
one goal of the Debian-Med project is to prevent people from forking by
providing the best and most feature rich software to fit the needed
applications.
In this aspect we would have liked it more to contact the MUSCLE authors
by sending them a patch. I hope that the author of the muscle package
in Debian will be able to sort this out. We would be happy if this would
support your work in Mauve.
The Makefiles I have created for libMUSCLE also build the standalone
muscle binary. If the library were updated to include Bob Edgar's
changes for muscle 3.7, would libMUSCLE alone be sufficient for debian-med?
All of these libraries are basically just support libraries for
mauveAligner, progressiveMauve, and the related C++ programs.
Initially I had hoped that other developers might pick them up and
use them in separate projects, however that seems to not have been
the case.
I'm in very favour of this approach because factorizing software in
pieces of separate libraires is a very good strategy to involve more
developers. I would like to support your intention to maintain these
libraries and that's why we try to start these libraries in Debian.
Actually I startet with libGenome. (I had some technical trouble with
this but that's an issue for a different thread[1].)
It seems I may have spoken too soon about a lack of a workaround for the
static library versioning and the duplicate version number issue. It
turns out that removing the "-release" option from the LDFLAGS portion
of Makefile.am also removes the duplicate version identifier from the
resulting library name. The approach is still somewhat unsatisfying
since I have to update my Makefile.am and about 10 other places every
time there's an API version bump, but that should be relatively
infrequent since these libraries are basically stable and not under new
development.
For ease of building and maintenance I am now considering pushing
libGenome and libMems and mauveAligner together into a single source
tree, and eliminating the dependency on libClustalW since it is
obsolete anyways. I could of course be persuaded otherwise :-)
I'd vote against merging the others. If you ask me the very simple
web page for libGenome perfectly does the job. It just has to be updated
to not point to old versions. If you dare about maintaining it to
keep version numbers up to date, just do not mention the version number
and point to the download directory of the web server, the SVN repository
and the API docs. This would be perfectly sufficient to keep people
informed while freeing you from the work to update the page from time
to time. Alternatively using the SourceForge repository could
perhaps save some time - but that's your decision.
On your suggestion I have created basic homepages for each of the libraries:
libGenome
http://asap.ahabs.wisc.edu/software/software-development-libraries/libgenome.html
libClustalW
http://asap.ahabs.wisc.edu/software/software-development-libraries/libclustalw.html
libMUSCLE
http://asap.ahabs.wisc.edu/software/software-development-libraries/libmuscle.html
libMems
http://asap.ahabs.wisc.edu/software/software-development-libraries/libmems.html
Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to help.
Regards,
-Aaron
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