[OWW-Discuss] Proposal to 'Wikify' GenBank Meets Stiff Resistance

[Alexander Wait Zaranek]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 6:54 AM, Dan Bolser <dan.bolser at gmail.com> wrote:
> In summary, I think it is 'doable', but it isn't a case of simply mirroring
> into a revisioning system. We need to work on some protocols for
> synchronization.
>
Efficient merging (not just forking) is an active area of version
control systems research.  Eg.:

* http://git.or.cz/
* http://bazaar-vcs.org/
* http://darcs.net/

If you'd enjoy seeing Linus Torvalds talk to Google about why he hates
subversion--Google employs a few of the key subversion authors--I
found his talk amusing, if not entirely illuminating:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

Just as a test, I'm making a mirror of ftp://ftp.wwpdb.org/pub/pdb/
and I'll put the results in our content addressable storage system
where the data is striped across our cluster and available for batch
processing.

"c) allow users to freely edit the data, including automatic clean up
'bots', algorithms, etc., etc.
d) have all changes automatically emailed to a mailing list for
community review, approval etc."

Can you elaborate on this?

Sasha

PS. Speaking of the subversion authors, I also really enjoyed the
subversion authors talk on making a "successful free software
project":  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSFDm3UYkeE   They give a
pretty firm warning that a successful project should have a very
narrow focus or risk being unsuccessful in everything.