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From: roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.genbank
Subject: Re: GenBank software
Message-ID: <1990Aug8.183417.13479@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: 8 Aug 90 18:34:17 GMT
References: <9008081410.AA02507@alw.nih.gov>
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Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City
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CZJ@CU.NIH.GOV (Jim Cassatt) writes:
> I would begin by reminding the community that the purpose of GenBank
> has been to collect and distribute data.  The development of sofware
> was left to the community.

	I pretty much agree with Jim that the GenBank folks are better off
trying to do well what they are supposed to do (and by and large, I think
they do an admirable job), and not expend limited resources on projects
outside their scope.  I also agree that the job of a database maintainer is
to distribute the data in a moderately raw form, not to over-package it
with software that fits their pre-existing notion of what the data are
going to be used for.  So, I guess I have to agree that it's not really
GenBank's job to write the database parsing software Dan suggests.

	So, given that, I propose that those of us who are interested (and
I'm certainly one of them) get together privately by email and work on it.
If folks from GB and/or IG want to be in on it, fine.  If not, that's fine
too.  We could come up with a set of routines for parsing a locus and make
them publicly available to whoever wants them on an "as is" basis.  If you
are interested, write me and/or this mailing list/newsgroup.  If enough
people are interested, I'll set up a mailing list redistribution alias and
we can start arguing about the problem. :-) If nobody is interested, I'll
assume it was a dumb idea to begin with and drop it.
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane?  Did you say arcane?  It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"