Filenames matter

so what does this do?

By Faith Okamoto

I saw that Li has another “mini” tool, so I though I’d look, as I did with minimap2. Also, it’s the literal last day of the month. Being on vacation does that to ya.

This month’s paper: Li H. Fast genomic read alignment with minibwa. arXiv

  1. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2606.15357

Original code

This paper’s code is on GitHub.

Critique

Standard disclaimer: issues with published code are not necessarily anyone’s fault, and often are due to nothing more nefarious than time constraints.

I have basically one main grip with this code, and it’s late, so I’m just going to put it in a little center section. The filenames for this project are incredibly inscrutable. What does mbpriv.h do? pe.c? If I’m trying to navigate this to find the bit of algorithm that’s relevant to me, where do I look? (Clicking in to the files doesn’t help either; things are over-briefly named in general, and there aren’t good docstrings for anything including the file in general.)

The README doesn’t provide pointers for what goes in what files. The files themselves don’t provide help either. Usually I can at least go by names (e.g. a file called readfilter.hpp is probably about filtering reads). But abbreviations that only make sense to the maintainers? Those are inscrutable to people trying to learn.

Brilliant tool and algorithms, I’m sure. I just can’t understand the code. And I can’t even navigate via filenames.


If there’s a recent paper you’d like me to look through, shoot me an email. Address in my CV.

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