Short term/ high priority

• Currently,  BIRCH must be completely uninstalled in order to update to a new version. Is there a way to update a 'live' BIRCH installation, so that there is no downtime? This is particularly critical if people are going to run long-running jobs.
  
• GDE has several issues on recent Linux releases that prevent it from running.
• Fedora11 - xset/font problem - won't launch
  
• Ubuntu 9.04 - launches, but entire X11 desktop freezes
  
• Fasta truncates sequence names if they're too long. May need to use uniqid.py to encode and decode names.
• Change format of BIRCH Administrator's email address so that it isn't a spam target.
  
• makemenus.py - ignore comment lines in menulist
  
• Replace heapsortHGL with a separate sort program
  
• Need better documentation for the fact that BIRCH changes the command prompt. Should we set an environment variable to let the user turn this off? This may be best to do in a $HOME/.birchrc file.
  
• XYLEM
• Splitdb in biolegato can result in runaway jobs if run without data.
  
• getob - DBLINK line overwrites DEFINITION line in message file
• check for new Feature Keys
  
• Documentation pages could have an icon indicating whether a program or package is part of the BIRCH core or locally-installed.
  
• SeqHound at www.blueprint.org is no longer functional. Need to replace dgde SeqHound calls with calls to Entrez or other data warehouses.
  
• Need a better way to check for the presence of critical things like text editors, viewers etc during a new BIRCH installation, and set those to the defaults.
  
• Update Cn3D and add CDTree
  
• There seem to be two problems when sequin7.3 is run on linux-intel through vncserver. On some Linux systems, the application launches but all buttons display squares for every character, rather than the correct words. This problem also appears with Sequin7.35. On other systems, buttons display properly, but it is impossible to select a file in the File open window. You can appear to select and double click, or even type in the name, but the file never appears to load. You just go back to the startup window. These problems do not appear to happen when Sequin is run at the console, or as a standalone X11 app forwarded to the local desktop via ssh.
  
• On some systems, mv is aliased to mv -i. This will cause some scripts to fail if they try to overwrite an already existing file, because the script will try to prompt the user. The problem has been fixed in dnadist.csh and protdist.csh, but other scripts, and the .GDEmenus files, need to be checked to see which ones might be susceptible to this problem.
• bioLegato - need a way to paste in sequences eg. past into a text editor. This is sometimes more convenient than having to first save as a file.
  
• bioLegato - splitdb can sometimes enter an infinite loop when called from features
  
• bioLegato - add -N # option for fasta fasta/nucleotide. Also -Z option.
  
• For local.cshrc.source and local.profile.source: option for shell to recognize BACKSPACE key.
• get programs to recognize new amino acid symbols: J = Leu/Ile = Xle; O = Pyl = pyrrolysine. In particular, the following programs packages need to be looked at:
• readseq
• bioLegato
• FSAP
• XYLEM
• GNOME, KDE menus
• rethink strategy for local copies of PIR/SwissProt
  
• add newuser and nobirch to birchdb (write man pages)
• Phylip - add 'gendist' to  mbiolegato;
  
• dGDE
• expanded functions
  
• Databases: standard distribution
• get XYLEM programs to work with remote database services
• Databases: add-ons
• specific documentation for
• local BLAST database installation
• local FASTA dababase installation
• For programs with no GDE Help file, create a dummy help file saying that no help is available.

• miniBIRCH: let's see if we can shrink the size of the .tar.gz file by reorganization of $doc or $dat directories.
• All programs that do resampling should be able to save the raw tree file
• GETTREES in tree2flat.py needs to be implemented more efficiently for translating very large treefiles
  
• update Phylip most recent version
  
• Phylip - output to TGIF using pstoedit command
  
• complete set of pattern discovery/pattern matching programs
• better support for genomic sequences of arbitrary length
• need a more sophisticated usage logging mechanism
• $BIRCH_TMP points to a directory that can be used by scripts for temporary files, usually /usr/local/tmp. We probably need a standalone script that can be called by other scripts to see if this directory is available, and if so, to use it.
• It probably isn't hard to add code that would let each user have their own cshrc.source or profile.source files that could override the local BIRCH system. But, it there any advantage to doing this, versus just telling them to modify .cshrc or .profile?
  

Long term

• BIRCH collaborations?
• EMBOSS - complete biolegato menus
• Eric Linton, MSU: macGDE
• BIRCH under MacOSX?
• New format to generate bioLegato menu items eg. PISE, EMBOSS ACD?