Bioconductor is an open development project, meaning that all developers from the scientific community are able to contribute software. In order to foster coherence within the project, developers are encouraged to follow package guidelines to make it easier for others to use and extend the software. New software is added to the project through a package submission process.

Mailing List

The developer mailing list facilitates communication amongst Bioconductor developers.

Source Control System

Packages contributed to Bioconductor are added to the project subversion repository. Contributing developers are then provided with password protected write access to their portion of the codebase. Anonymous access to this repository is also available; the source control page provides more information.

Package Maintenance

Changes in R and Bioconductor could result in the malfunction of software packages. Therefore, package maintainers should periodically check their packages to ensure that they are still working as expected. To facilitate this, Bioconductor maintains a daily build system to check that every package in the release and development branches can be built via R CMD build and checked via R CMD check. Packages that fail to pass these checks will regretfully be dropped from the next release of Bioconductor.