[Bioc-devel] Short URLs for packages?

[Tim Triche, Jr.]

> Packages are (read: should be, IMHO) published, citable pieces of research, though. Imagine if a paper you cite were silently updated without the doi/citation changing. That wouldn't be good 

I don't disagree, but the existing setup does nothing to address that. Citation('limma'), for example, does.

.../release/... and .../devel/... can change at any time, potentially overnight (with or without a new BioC release).  The only real way to cite an exact version is to cite that exact version, which is already the proper way to do things and would remain unaffected by this, at least AFAIK. 

Perhaps a useful addendum would be for the mnemonic 

http://bioconductor.org/limma 

To redirect to

http://bioconductor.org/packages/limma/whateverTheMostRecentStableVersionMayBe/

And then everything is explicit. 

Does that address the competing issues discussed herein?  

Best,

--t