[mart-dev] Plea for stability

[Tom Oinn]

Hi guys,

I know this isn't really a mart issue so much as a 'use of mart' one but 
can people please bear in mind the implications of, say, renaming all 
the filters in a mart? The (at least) human genome sequence database at 
ensembl seems to have done this recently, the effect is that all 
workflows which used to work on this data set have started failing.

While 'chromosome_name_filter' is indeed prettier than 'chr_name_filter' 
oddly enough my code can't magically tell that these are meant to be the 
same thing and so it breaks things. As the things it's breaking are 
workflows written by our users this is a bad thing mkay?

Any change to an API (and the mart schemas fall into this category the 
moment you expose a query service) MUST be announced somewhere, it's not 
acceptable for a public service to shift around like this with no 
notice. Same goes for changes to the mart metadata, there should be a 
channel by which you can notify us (or, better, our users) of these 
changes.

As it is I've just spent an hour debugging a workflow that was working 
fine a couple of weeks ago, I'm quite tolerant (hey, I'm used to 
debugging distributed systems) but our users aren't, too many occasions 
like this and they give up on us and they give up on biomart by implication.

Tom