conda-forge package?

[johnlees]

Thank you for this update to sdsl-lite. We're keen to include this in a project, and ideally would like to maintain our dependencies via conda.

To help with this, we were wondering whether you:
a) Had plans of getting this merged upstream (eventually), or whether this is likely to continue to live as a separate library?
b) If the latter, whether we could set it up its own conda-forge recipe?

(if the former, the conda-forge recipe will update when you release v3 upstream, which makes things easy!)

[eseiler]

Hey @johnlees,

a) Had plans of getting this merged upstream (eventually), or whether this is likely to continue to live as a separate library?

We currently have no such plans, there are a few reasons:

• We (the SeqAn Team) maintain this repository as a dependency, to adapt things (e.g. make the SDSL header-only) for compatibility, and also to include some new features.
• I only have maintainer (no admin or owner) rights and as such cannot change settings in this repo or the organization; this means we would have to reach Simon Gog for this (and to eventually be given at least admin of this repo).
• We maintain this repo in addition to our project- and SeqAn-related workload, i.e. we are not confident that we could provide the amount of support needed if we pushed v3 upstream.
• As we developed SDSL v3 while developing SeqAn3, any sort of compatibility for projects switching from the upstream SDSL v2 to this version was not a priority for us. Even though this is a major release (and hence major breakage is expected), many fundamental aspects changed. The main points are the build system (header-only, optional library build), the drastically changed C++-Standard / compiler version support, as well as some changes in the API.

b) If the latter, whether we could set it up its own conda-forge recipe?

I think this would be great. Are you experienced with conda-forge? If so, would it be possible for you to create a recipe? I'm only experienced with Bioconda recipes. However, I'm willing to act as one of the maintainers for the conda-forge recipe.

---

Side Note: I'm aware that https://github.com/vgteam/sdsl-lite is a very popular fork of the upstream repo. I'm sure there are many things that vgteam/sdsl-lite and xxsds/sdsl-lite could mutually benefit from each other.

[johnlees]

Thanks for the detailed and clear answer. It sounds like the best thing to do would be to propose a separately named package for your fork. I can make a draft of the recipe and add you as maintainer.

I've had a few conda-forge packages accepted before. It's a slightly slower and more thorough review process than bioconda typically, but otherwise a very similar build system. Anyway, I'll try and get this started shortly.

[johnlees]

also tagging @samhorsfield96 who is interested in using this

[mpetri]

Just made @eseiler admin of this repo.