[Bioc-devel] Looking for info on how Bioconductor package developers negotiate breaking changes

[Chris Bogart]

Hi, I'm looking for some help from developers who write Bioconductor
packages. My research group is interested in the choices package
managers and repositories are make when designing their ecosystems.
Packaging and modules systems like Bioconductor and CRAN make very
different design choices from each other, and from packaging systems
in other platforms like Node.js's NPM and Perl's CPAN. We'd like to
know what the impact of those design choices are on how you negotiate
breaking changes among Bioconductor developers when packages depend on
each other. We're also interested in what values you think
Bioconductor's package infrastructure is trying to optimize.

Could I ask people to take ~20 minutes of your time and fill out our
survey at http://breakingapis.org/survey? We'll report back to the
Bioconductor community the results (or there's a sign up link to be
notified when results are out at http://breakingapis.org).

(If you release a package in some other way, such as CRAN or directly
via Github, or use other ecosystems such as Node.js/NPM, Python/PyPI,
Hackage, or something else, we're still interested -- just make a
different "software ecosystem" choice on the first page. The study is
a comparison among ecosystems; Bioconductor is one point of
comparison).

Thank you,
Chris Bogart
Institute for Software Research
Carnegie Mellon University