hippke / tls

Transit Least Squares: An optimized transit-fitting algorithm to search for periodic transits of small planets
MIT License
48 stars 25 forks source link

Just a quick question #73

Closed rmmilewi closed 5 years ago

rmmilewi commented 5 years ago

Hi there! This isn't a bug report or a feature request, so I hope you don't mind me asking this question here.

My name is Reed, and I'm a software engineering researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in the US. I've created an issue on your repo just to ask a quick question. If you don't have time or don't care to respond, feel free to ignore me and/or delete this issue.

Where I work, we have a very diverse ecosystem of cutting-edge research codes spanning every discipline you could imagine. I'm part of our software engineering research department, and it's our job to keep that ecosystem robust and healthy. Part of that means helping scientists to adopt good software practices. Right now, my mind has been on software versioning/release schemes (e.g. semantic versioning).

In order to build a case for/against getting my people on-board with the practice, I figured I should ask people who already use versioning to release their software to see what they think. So I gathered up a list of scientific software repositories on GitHub, then I selected those that tracked versioned releases, that were reasonably active, etc. Finally, I picked a handful of those repos and decided to reach out to them. You were on that list.

Anyway, here's the question:

What do you believe are the benefits (or drawbacks) of having versioned releases of your software (i.e. 1.0.0, 1.1.0, 2.0.0...)? When should someone start thinking about versioning/releasing their code?

Just a sentence or two, that's all I need. For context, imagine the preceding sentence is this: "But don't just take my word for it, just listen to what this accomplished researcher has to say!".

Thank you so much!

Reed Milewicz rmilewi@sandia.gov