[Feature] BrainGlobe v1 Plan

[willGraham01]

BrainGlobe v1 Release Plan (currently in writing)

Essentially a more coherent summary of this plan, however updated with the decisions taken from the 31/08/2023 developer meeting.

UPDATE: Link is now broken, but the full plan is in the task list below.

Overview

For the release of BrainGlobe version 1, we plan to restructure a number of packages, rename/move a series of tools, reduce the number of separate tools that we bundle and require install for, and update the documentation to be consistent with these changes.

At a high level, these changes are:

• Creating a brainglobe-workflows repository, and moving the CLI tools currently in the cellfinder repository there, and renaming them.
• Moving the functionality of cellfinder-core and cellfinder-napari to cellfinder (this is a fundamental change in the package purpose).
• Merging the brainreg, brainreg-segment, and brainreg-napari packages together in similar manner to cellfinder-napari and cellfinder-core.
  • In light of the development of brainglobe-registration, brainreg-segment will remain standalone and become brainglobe-segmentation.
• Configure the brainglobe-meta package to provide a one-line pip install with the new package structure.
• Update the BrainGlobe documentation website with an updated user guide, high-level v2 changelog (aimed at users), detailed v2 changelog including broken features and their replacements, and updated developer / contributing guidelines.

Renaming on GitHub and PyPI knock-on effects

We want to retain the GitHub repositories for their usage metrics and historial links provided in publications.
We also cannot retire names on PyPI and then re-upload a package with the same name and different functionality.
Therefore, our plan is to sequentially "move" functionality between repositories on GitHub (which will preserve the usage metrics), through a series of PRs and the repository merge trick.

For PyPI, we will release "final" versions for all packages that are becoming redundant with no homonymous replacement package.
These final versions will introduce no functionality changes from the previous version, but the READMEs will update to point to the replacement package.
These versions should all be tagged with a suitable version number, ideally a version less than 1.0 to signify they were never intended for release.
They can then be marked as deprecated on PyPI.

For packages whose functionality is being moved and then replaced (cellfinder and possibly brainreg), we will do a similar thing to the above for the old state of the package - push a new version to PyPI pointing to the replacement.
Then when the new functionality replaces the old in the GitHub repo, we will push a new version release (v1.0 or higher) to PyPI with the new functionality.
This will have the slightly awkward affect of muddling our PyPI release history, but this is something we should comfortably be able to manage ourselves through the meta-package dependencies.

Detailed Task List

Tasks are organised into groups based on the packages they affect.
These groups are presented in a roughly chronological order, however due to the interdependencies between packages there will inevitably be blockages at certain points.

Although it's explicitly mentioned in each of the task lists below, these changes should all be done against a development branch in each repository.
Then the plan will be for us to pick a day, merge all the dev PRs into the respective mains, and then push new PyPI uploads.
This should ensure that none of our packages are left broken, but it also means that any hotfixes can be incorporated into the dev-branches via a rebase.

To track the completion of tasks, once a PR (against a dev branch or otherwise) is opened, add a link to that PR against the corresponding task in this list.
When the PR is merged, we can then tick off the sub-tasks and see where the change was introduced.

brainglobe/brainglobe-workflows

• [Feature] cellfinder migration to workflows for BG-v1 #45
• Depend on brainglobe meta-package rather than individual tools - Add hard dependency on brainglobe-meta package brainglobe-workflows#72

brainglobe/cellfinder

• Prepare for retirement, [Feature] cellfinder migration to workflows for BG-v1 #45
• Create dev branch for pulling-in of cellfinder-core and cellfinder-napari [Feature] BG-V1: cellfinder-core and napari merge #46

brainglobe/cellfinder-core

• [Feature] BG-V1: cellfinder-core and napari merge #46

brainglobe/cellfinder-napari

• [Feature] BG-V1: cellfinder-core and napari merge #46

brainglobe/brainreg-segment

• [BGV1] Updates to brainreg-segment #36

brainglobe/brainreg-napari

• [BGV1] Updates to brainreg-napari #37

brainglobe/brainreg

• [BGV1] Updates to brainreg #38

brainglobe/brainglobe-meta

• [Feature] Version 1 release! 🥳  brainglobe-meta#38
  • Update dependencies
    • Include (new) cellfinder, pinned >=1.0
    • Include (new) brainreg, pinned >=1.0
    • Pin min. version of all other tools for consistency
  • Update metadata if necessary
  • Update tool exposure
    • Expose brainreg, cellfinder, etc tools under brainglobe name
  • Update README
• Push version 1 to PyPI

brainglobe/website (and other documentation related tasks)

• Blog post with a statement of intent for upcoming update
• Version 1 change branch
  • Start v2 changelog PR
  • Create high-level user changelog page
  • Update install guidelines
    • Recommended install is pip into a clean venv/conda env etc.
    • MacOS M1 users have issues with napari, which will require some additional instructions
  • Update developer / contributing docs
  • Update tool documentation with upcoming changes
    • brainglobe-workflows overview page, [Feature] cellfinder migration to workflows for BG-v1 #45
      • Should mention you need manual install of other packages if you're not going in via the meta-package
      • Detailed overview / usage tutorial for all the workflows
      • Clear mention of this is what cellfinder used to do, and has now been moved here
    • cellfinder updates, [Feature] cellfinder migration to workflows for BG-v1 #45
      • Docs, including usage-cases, for each of the submodules (possibly on sub-pages)
    • cellfinder-core updates [Feature] BG-V1: cellfinder-core and napari merge #46
    • cellfinder-napari updates [Feature] BG-V1: cellfinder-core and napari merge #46
    • brainreg updates [BGV1] Updates to documentation in in light of brainreg updates #39
  • Final version 1 blog and update: Version 1 release brainglobe.github.io#132

[adamltyson]

Looks good @willGraham01, thanks! Two small comments:

New ethos is that this package is just a fast one-time-quick install, so we don't directly expose anything under this package

Did we have this discussion? There's no reason for it to be in the initial release, but I think we should work towards from brainglobe import cellfinder etc.

When restructuring brainreg, I think we should also seperate the CLI for consistency. I don't think it needs to go into brainglobe-workflows as the CLI only includes functionality from the brainreg API. See brainglobe/brainreg#139.

[willGraham01]

Did we have this discussion? There's no reason for it to be in the initial release, but I think we should work towards from brainglobe import cellfinder etc.

You're right sorry - I've mixed this up with brainglobe-workflows (which we agreed should be standalone-installable without fetching cellfinder & brainreg). brainglobe-workflows will still ship with brainglobe-meta so will still be exposed via CLI, but of course doesn't need to be exposed via brainglobe (unless we want a from brainglobe import workflows-style API too)?

When restructuring brainreg, I think we should also seperate the CLI for consistency. I don't think it needs to go into brainglobe-workflows as the CLI only includes functionality from the brainreg API. See brainglobe/brainreg#139.

I've updated the brainreg task to make sure this is included.

[adamltyson]

You're right sorry - I've mixed this up with brainglobe-workflows (which we agreed should be standalone-installable without fetching cellfinder & brainreg). brainglobe-workflows will still ship with brainglobe-meta so will still be exposed via CLI, but of course doesn't need to be exposed via brainglobe (unless we want a from brainglobe import workflows-style API too)?

For now at least, I think workflows can remain CLI only. I would think that if users are using the API, they will be creating their own workflow, not importing an existing, inflexible one.

[willGraham01]

@adamltyson @alessandrofelder We previously said that workflows should not fetch cellfinder nor brainreg, but should rely on users having them already. Not sure what our ethos was, but I'm guessing it was along the lines of when the meta-package is ready this won't matter.

However since then, it looks like workflows is now depending on cellfinder-core anyway. There's no harm in having them as fixed dependencies, and since we're doing the BrainGlobe v1 update incrementally, should I stick to this convention?

[alessandrofelder]

Could we directly depend on brainglobe-meta already?
If not, whatever is easiest - seems like something that can be easily tidied up after?

[willGraham01]

Could we directly depend on brainglobe-meta already?

Maybe - I'm not sure what that would mean when for when we merge cf-core and cf-napari and rename them cellfinder though. But yeah, once all the packages are moved around we can clean up later.

I thought the plan is to have brainglobe-meta as the top-level package though? So brainglobe-meta should be fetching brainglobe-workflows (since users will still want to use the cellfinder CLI tool). workflows technically would need to depend on the other brainglobe packages in case anyone wanted to install it standalone. If installing the meta-package, it'll fetch workflows and all its dependencies anyway so users don't need to worry.

[alessandrofelder]

I thought the plan is to have brainglobe-meta as the top-level package though? So brainglobe-meta should be fetching brainglobe-workflows (since users will still want to use the cellfinder CLI tool).

Right, sorry, makes sense.

OK, so IIUC at least for our CI we should have it depend on the other brainglobe packages - so we may as well make it depend on the ones it needs, for now?

[willGraham01]

so we may as well make it depend on the ones it needs, for now?

Sounds good. We can always "hide" them as dev/benchmark dependencies later if there's anything we really don't want users to get mixed up in.

[adamltyson]

I think the idea was for workflows to depend on bg-meta, but not the other way round. This would make sure the workflows (which are not ideal in their structure) don't break the metapackage.

[adamltyson]

Plus workflows can/will contain non-BG dependencies that may be incompatible.

[alessandrofelder]

Plus workflows can/will contain non-BG dependencies that may be incompatible.

Good point.
So for now

• make workflows depend on cellfinder-core and whatever else we need (e.g to run the cellfinder benchmark)
• once we are happy with the meta-package, replace those dependencies with the metapackage

?

[adamltyson]

Sounds good to me.