[Bioc-devel] Bioconductor Git/GitHub Mirrors

Dan Tenenbaum dtenenba at fredhutch.org
Tue Jun 16 21:00:00 CEST 2015


Dear Bioconductors,

We're pleased to announce the availability of Bioconductor Git Mirrors. 
These are read-only GitHub repositories (available under https://github.com/Bioconductor-mirror) 
for every Bioconductor software package. These repositories are synchronized with our 
Subversion repository. Package maintainers (or anyone else) can fork these repositories
and do their development on the fork. Complete documentation of the mirrors is at

http://bioconductor.org/developers/how-to/git-mirror/

These mirrors supersede the Git-SVN bridge, which is now deprecated. 
Creation of new bridges is disabled and maintainers who are using the bridge
should migrate to the Git mirrors as soon as it's convenient, as the bridge
will eventually go away. Instructions for migrating can be found at the above link.

Some features of the new Git Mirrors, and why we feel they are a better solution than the Git-SVN bridge:

 - The mirrors contain complete commit history.
 - The mirrors contain release branches for Bioconductor 3.0 and 3.1, and 
   new releases will be added as they happen. You will no longer need 
   separate repositories for release and devel.
 - Setup is easy and you no longer have to grant any permissions on your
   repository to other users. You can commit directly to Subversion
   using git-svn (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-svn).
 - Each git commit appears in the SVN log as a distinct SVN commit; commits 
   are no longer grouped together as they were with the bridge. Each git
   commit can be mapped to a specific svn commit, and vice versa.
 - The Git mirrors are much more reliable.
 - Use is flexible. You can use git locally (without GitHub) or you 
   can use GitHub as well, to take advantage of all its social coding features.
 - Using GitHub's code search, you can search the entire Bioconductor codebase.
   Here's a sample search: https://goo.gl/jI92Ys
 - Subversion is fully supported and remains the cannonical repository; use
   of Git and GitHub is optional.

We are excited about these new mirrors (brought to you by the hard
work of Jim Hester) and we hope you are too. Questions and comments are
welcome on the bioc-devel mailing list.

Dan



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