[Bioc-devel] Bioconductor's GIT transition

[Turaga, Nitesh]

Dear Bioconductor Developers,

Big news! We are planning to migrate from SVN to git. This is a major change in our version control model. We understand this may be disruptive to some developers and are working to make the transition as smooth as possible.  The end goal is to provide a versioning system that supports both robust code development as well as community coding.

Git has really emerged as a modern replacement to SVN, and is widely used in the bioinformatics community. Many Bioconductor packages are maintained primarily on git and perhaps a majority of the commits to our SVN repository are from git. Git encourages broad community participation in development of both Bioconductor infrastructure and contributed software / experiment data packages. Recent developers of new packages have been using git and Github for their package development, and this has worked very well for both developers and core team reviewers.

We are producing robust scripts to create git repositories of each package in our current SVN repository. The git repositories contain the complete commit history for 'devel', and for all releases as branches. Details for interaction with our git server, including the role of github, are still being finalized.

More information about the specifics of the transition plan will be announced in the middle of March. We anticipate a fully functional 'beta' version available for broad testing immediately after the next Bioconductor release, in mid-April. Once we are confident in the new repositories and work flows, we will switch to an exclusively git-based version control model; SVN repositories will remain available as a 'read only' resource for as long as is feasible.

We welcome all feedback during this test period; please respond to this post with comments, or contact nitesh.turaga at roswellpark.org<mailto:nitesh.turaga at roswellpark.org> directly.

Best,

Nitesh Turaga
Bioconductor Core Team


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