On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 5:40 PM, Chris Fields <cjfields@illinois.edu> wrote:
I'm of the opposite mind; I'm not sure there is an absolute need to have one's tools be a branch or fork of the main tool shed, though I agree there is also utility in allowing that (having a customized 'main' repo, or optimizing tools already present).
To clarify, I have been using branches on an hg fork of the main Galaxy repository up until now, then preparing tarballs for upload to the Galaxy Tool Shed. I could equally have tracked my local changes under git, svn or cvs. The point is under this model, the Tool Shed has no connection to whatever repository (or repositories) the tool author uses on their machine. Barring teething issues like Bug 584/585/586 tool authors could continue to use this development model, where the fact that the Galaxy Tool Shed uses an hg repository internally is an irrelevant internal implementation detail. As far as I know, there are no plans to make the Tool Shed work directly with a full Galaxy hg repo - only mini-repositories, one for each tool or tool suite.
Having completely separate repos for tools seems cleaner, focusing development on those tools alone (not any of the others present in a branch) and pushes maintenance of the tool back to the tool developer themselves
Yes, and that is the model the new Galaxy Tool Shed is following. Although I'm a little hazy on the details of tool suites in the new model (and there are lots of situations where it makes sense to bundle several tools).
(e.g. there is no need for the galaxy devs to 'pull' in changes at any point into a main repo).
Well, there still is for general bug fixes, adding new file formats, and merging any tools which they decide to include in the core set.
This might also allow the galaxy devs to designate a set of 'blessed' or supported tools in various repositories.
Indeed.
Re: git: as Peter knows I'm also primarily a git/github user. It is feasible at some future point to allow git/github repos. For instance, one could possibly integrate github usage via this:
Of course, I think it's much more important that any additional vcs integration wait until the new tool shed interface stabilizes somewhat, but (at least from the github perspective) seems like it shouldn't be terribly hard to do.
True - if there were sufficient demand from Tool Shed contributors. Peter