Acquiring release and developmental metadata packages

The Bioconductor project now provides two release levels for the annotation metadata packages. The first, "Release", always is intended for use with the current Bioconductor release. The second, "Devel", is intended for use with the developmental Bioconductor packages.

Acquiring the release level annotation packages is straightforward. The links on the MetaData page will always correspond with the release level annotation packages. Also, people who are using getBioC, install.packages2, or update.packages2 without explicitly allowing the functions to acces developmental packages will always install the release level annotation packages.

To download and install devel level annotation packages, one must either use getBioC with the develOK=TRUE setting, or use either install.packages2 or update.packages2 with the develOK=TRUE argument. With these settings, the developmental annotation repository can be accessed, and any requests to install one of these packages will allow the software to get these developmental packages.