[ome-devel] Fiji now ships Bio-Formats dev_4_4 stable builds

[Curtis Rueden]

Hi everyone,

For some time, Fiji has been shipping Bio-Formats builds from the
*develop* branch
of Bio-Formats (i.e., 4.5.x), rather than from the *dev_4_4* branch (i.e.,
4.4.x). There were several reasons for this:

1) There is still work on *develop* that is not part of *dev_4_4* and hence
not part of any released version of Bio-Formats. In particular, I made
major improvements to the Prairie format reader a few months ago, which
became part of *develop* but not yet *dev_4_4*.

2) There was a technical issue with the ImageJ updater which prevented us
from switching back to 4.4.x releases or builds.

The Prairie work is now pending inclusion in *dev_4_4*:
https://github.com/openmicroscopy/bioformats/pull/508

And the ImageJ updater issue has now been fixed:
http://trac.imagej.net/ticket/1603

So I have now uploaded Fiji to use *dev_4_4* again. As documented on the
Fiji wiki (http://fiji.sc/Bio-Formats#Source_code), Fiji's *fiji* branch (
http://github.com/fiji/bioformats/tree/fiji) reflects the version of
Bio-Formats currently available from the Fiji updater. At the moment, that
is *dev_4_4* with PR #508 merged in, to ensure the Prairie fixes remain
available to end users.

Unfortunately, reverting Fiji to dev_4_4 served as a forcible reminder
that I forgot a critically important reason why we were using *develop*
 builds:

3) ImgLib2 and ImageJ2 depend on *develop*. And Fiji inherits the ImageJ
update site, which is what ImageJ2 uses. So now, there is an impending
issue with the ImageJ 2.0.0-beta-7 release: the ImageJ update site will
need to switch back to *develop* builds again for beta7.

Switching back to *dev_4_4* has also very likely broken any existing
ImageJ2 beta installations that update to the latest code. (Since ImageJ2
is still in beta, I am less concerned about that, though it is still not
ideal.)

Moving forward, ImageJ will increasingly depend on the SCIFIO refactoring
work, which is all based on *develop*. If we want to also provide a stable
Bio-Formats update site for ImageJ from openmicroscopy.org (which was the
tentative eventual plan), we will need to carefully consider how to
accomplish that. It can probably be done but may require shipping 4.4.x and
4.5.x side by side, which would be rather unfortunate.

Regards,
Curtis
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openmicroscopy.org.uk/pipermail/ome-devel/attachments/20130507/ebcdd6c7/attachment.html>