[Bioc-devel] Please bump version number when committing changes

[Dan Tenenbaum]

Hello,

Looking through our svn logs, I see that there are many commits that are not accompanied by version bumps. 
All svn commits (or, if you are using the git-svn bridge, every group of commits included in a push) should include a version bump (that is, incrementing the "z" segment of the x.y.z version number). This practice is documented at http://www.bioconductor.org/developers/how-to/version-numbering/ .

Failure to bump the version has two consequences:

1) Your changes will not propagate to our package repository or web site, so users installing your package via biocLite() will not receive the latest changes unless you bump the version.

2) Users *can* always get the current files of your package using Subversion, but if you've made changes without bumping the version number, it can be difficult to troubleshoot problems. If two people are looking at what appears to be the same version of a package, but it's behaving differently, it can be really frustrating to realize that the packages actually differ (but not by version number).

So if you're not already, please get in the habit of bumping the version number with each set of changes you commit.

Let us know on bioc-devel if you have any questions about this. 

Thanks,
Dan