On Wednesday, August 21, 2013, Ido Tamir wrote:
Why the dislike for quick turnover? Could somebody present the arguments for people not having been at the BOF?
People don't have to upgrade - unless its breaking changes that e.g. disable the possibility to download from the public toolshed which forced me to upgrade.
I personally don't immediately apply the updates to our (perhaps relatively small) Galaxy instance, unless it includes a bug fix I am particularly interested in, or I need it for a new tool I want to install. This is down to my time rather than anything else - as there is always the chance of things breaking, so needs planning accordingly.
So monthly or two-monthly seems about right, but longer than that is frustrating if I am waiting for a fix. Sorter releases just means I will skip more of them, but there is still a time sink reviewing each set of release notes to make this judgement.
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I would not even split things between breaking changes and minor changes. I think this slows down development of the platform and what concerns
people most, the tools, are developed independently of the platform and one can upgrade them any time.
Actually as a Tool developer, things are often NOT independent of the Galaxy version - I have had to hold back releases to the Tool Shed because they won't work until a bug fix is released to the stable branch, and then allow some time before we can assume most potential users have the update installed.
(This is another example where real version numbers like major.minor.revision for Galaxy releases would help - along with the related issue of tools being able to specify a minimum version of Galaxy they require)
Peter