Re: [IMP-dev] building of lone modules/applications/biological_systems

[Daniel Russel <>]

On Dec 13, 2010, at 1:52 PM, Ben Webb wrote:

> On 12/13/10 1:38 PM, Daniel Russel wrote:
>> Aren't all lab desktops running the same distribution?
> 
> Not today they're not. Your machine, for example, runs Fedora 13, and 
> mine, Fedora 14. I typically don't upgrade all of the desktops 
> simultaneously because 1) this would be massively disruptive and 2) 
> early adopters play with the new Fedora releases for a little while (and 
> compare them with the old) so we have a chance to report any bugs back 
> to the Fedora folks.
Supporting two distributions isn't that much extra (and having builds on both seems like a useful thing to do during a transition anyway). And if it is only a few early adopters then not supporting  a few machines isn't really much of a drawback. Likewise, have occasionally short periods where things are awkward (eg during the upgrade to a new fedora), are much of a drawback. One can just move the builds over the new fedora at the start of a general upgrade and people using them who haven't been upgraded yet have to use the pre-upgrade version. 


> 
>>> (and old versions will become unusable if any dependency's API
>>> changes, when there is a Fedora update, etc.).
>> Yes, it is a problem when packages are updated during the day.
> 
> No, your suggestion was that we have builds dating back months. There 
> will obviously be many packages updated between the time such a build is 
> made and today.
Yes, a build from some months ago is less likely to work than one from more recently. The frequency of such breaking changes is reasonably small though (based on running old IMP builds around my machine), so it doesn't decrease the utility too much (and provides a natural flushing out time for old builds). 

Make sense?