On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Kasper Daniel Hansen <
kasperdanielhansen@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Vincent Carey
> <stvjc@channing.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > I didn't mean to imply that the situation can't be improved, but I still
> > believe costs and benefits of changes of this sort are hard to reckon.
> For
> > me a real unknown is the added managerial cost of centralization of
> generic
> > definitions.  If lots of people have write privilege over the generic
> > repository, I can imagine nontrivial confusions; if management is
> delegated
> > to an individual or small group, there can be discouraging bottlenecks.
> Our
> > ad hoc approach has worked but with blemishes.  I'd like some evidence
> that
> > a more systematic approach would have fewer blemishes.  In theory it
> would,
> > but the practical solution requires some decisions on consensus and
> process
> > that will be costly to make correctly.  Is there a language in which the
> > problem area has been addressed in a more satisfactory way?
> >
> > My gut reaction is that if people really wanted to smooth things out with
> > bio-oriented generics, they'd agree with one another that the generic
> should
> > have a specific form, and ask a Biobase maintainer to have it defined in
> > Biobase.  Could we do some case studies with this approach -- "strand"
> might
> > be a reasonable initial case study -- and then decide on whether an
> > additional package will be better?
>
> (1) Having a separate package would make this very lean.  I don't
> think people consider depending on Biobase a lean solution, but I
> could be wrong.
>

I would assume that dependence would not be necessary but that the necessary
connections
would be established through namespace imports.  I think we want Biobase
installed very widely
and kept up to date in devel installations, so import should be adequate.


> (2) Your point about who and how it gets decided that a generic is
> being put in a central package is well taken.  I am certainly not
> suggesting that all generics should go there automatically, but my
> feeling is that this should be somewhat easy to decide, since it
> really just requires the community to agree that some method is likely
> to be useful across more than one package.
>
> I do agree that it is hard to predict whether the effort will be worth
> it.  My only 2cp is that it looks like the effort is small.
>
> Kasper
>

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