[ome-devel] OME Files C++ sub-resolution read and write support

[Sebastien Besson (Staff)]

Dear Roger,

Thanks very much for the email and the links indicating the progress of OME-TIFF pyramid support in OME Files C++.

Since our last release of OME Files adding writing support (0.5.0; Dec. 2017), a large portion of our activity has been shifted towards extending the open OME file formats and especially adding support to Bio-Formats for reading and writing OME-TIFF pyramids. This work is expected to remain the primary goal of the OME Formats team in the upcoming months beyond the maintenance and support of the Bio-Formats library. We owe the community an update on all this and will announce in a blog shortly.

As a result, the OME team does not currently have the capacity to drive new OME Files C++ features or even review external contributions. Additionally, as discussed in [1], maintaining the set of Continuous Integration jobs across moving platforms and requirements is becoming increasingly costly. We won’t release any additional work on OME Files beyond 0.5.0 in the foreseeable future.  This is purely a resourcing and prioritisation issue-- we definitely aim to continue the OME Files project, but we need the funding to do so.

We do understand that your current work on OME Files has been initiated to match the ongoing Java work. First of all, we are very happy to see the community taking ownership of a project that we cannot drive at the moment. Although we cannot offer to review and integrate it into our repository with our current quality standard, we would like to propose a new development scheme instead:

- The OME Files C++ repos will be marked as read-only for the time being and open PRs closed indicating the current status of the project.
- The Continuous Integration jobs using OME Files [2] will be progressively decommissioned. If needed, the job configurations can be captured for anyone who would like to set up their own copy.
- Ongoing development and support for the OME Files project should be considered as community driven i.e.
   - Either personal repositories or organizational repositories can act as the source of development of the code.
   - Ideally, tags and release happening on these community repositories should follow the latest OME tag i.e. 0.5.0.
- The ome-devel mailing list can remain the place to discuss updates, new features, support or minimally as a way to promote community tags or releases. If useful, the OME project can mirror community artifacts under https://downloads.openmicroscopy.org/.

Best regards
Seb, Josh, Jean-Marie, Chris and the OME Team

[1] https://github.com/ome/ome-cmake-superbuild/pull/186
[2] https://ci.openmicroscopy.org/view/Files/


> On 13 Aug 2018, at 08:25, Roger Leigh <rleigh at codelibre.net> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> I have completed the implementation of full sub-resolution pyramid read and write support in OME Files C++.  The pull requests are:
>
> https://github.com/ome/ome-files-cpp/pull/100
> https://github.com/ome/ome-qtwidgets/pull/42
> https://github.com/openmicroscopy/ome-files-performance/pull/62
> https://github.com/ome/ome-files-py/pull/30
>
> Additionally, I have sample OME-TIFF files with sub-resolutions generated with the above changes, which can be used for interoperability testing with Bio-Formats Java and OMERO, and as reference files for download.  If I could have SFTP upload credentials, I can upload these for you later today.
>
> I will also have a few commits forthcoming to fix ome-cmake-superbuild, which was broken by the disappearance of bzip.org a few days ago.
>
> If you would like to discuss any of the changes, I am happy to arrange a time to chat.
>
>
> Kind regards,
> Roger
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