version numbers and other admin issues

[Ben Woodcroft]

Hi,

A few small admin-related things:

1) The version number in the metabat help seems to be out of date. Compiling from source at least gives

$ metabat

MetaBAT: Metagenome Binning based on Abundance and Tetranucleotide frequency (version 0.32.5; unknown compilation date)

when the version is 2.11.3.

2) There's no tag for 2.11.3 as there is for 2.11.2

3) Incorporating the DATE << " " << TIME into the version string renders compilation not bitwise-reproducible. The chances of this affecting actual scientific conclusions seems minimal, but in the rigorous sense of "Is building reproducible? Yes or no?" including the compilation time means the answer becomes no. This is why in Guix, where reproducibility is important for being able to substitute a pre-built binary for a locally compiled one, we have replace the timestamp with "unknown compilation date" to that part of the code. Would it be possible to do something similar in the metabat code base itself?

Thanks. ben

[Don Kang]

Hi Ben,

Be careful. MetaBAT has currently two forms of binaries--metabat and metabat2. metabat (v0.32.5) is legacy version and will be no more development, and future development will be only for metabat2. I'm planning to replace metabat to metabat2 to reduce confusion, but for now I'll keep it that way for old users.

I've added new tag. Thanks for the report.

As for the data time issue, I need to investigate it. I'll let you know then.

Thanks.

[Don Kang]

I've made DATA and TIME as static strings for bitwise-reproducible. Let me know if you have any other concerns. BTW, since v.2.12.1, metabat executable is actually symlink to metabat2 binary and old metabat binary changed to metabat1. Hope this helps. Thanks.

[Ben Woodcroft]

Perfect. Thanks.