marbl / meryl

A genomic k-mer counter (and sequence utility) with nice features.
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Conda version issues #43

Open nhartwic opened 5 months ago

nhartwic commented 5 months ago

I've noticed that conda wants to default to installing an ancient meryl version labeled "2013" unless a user specifies a version. This seems undesirable and likely to cause confusion for users. They will likely experience "Unknown option" errors when attempting to follow modern instructions/usage because the 2013 version has a significantly reduced feature set and a very different interface. The fix is simply installing the actual most recent version with something like the following...

conda install -c bioconda meryl=1.4.1

...I'm not 100% sure if the managers of this git repo are also responsible for the conda meryl package. Your readme doesn't list conda as an optional installation method. If you are, it would be good if we could remove or rename that 2013 version so that 1.4.1 appears to be the latest version and will be installed by default. Alternatively, if there are fears of that breaking project somewhere by removing/renaming the 2013 version, then I'd suggest that meryl should adopt an alternative versioning system that simply prefixes the year onto the version. This would mean creating a new package named 2023.1.4.1 which conda should default to over the 2013 version.

If the managers of this git repo have nothing to do with the conda package or simply don't want to or aren't able to make any changes to it, I'd recomend simply leaving this issue open to help people who run into this simple issue.