[FieldTrip] Summary of changes to Fieldtrip?

[Robert Oostenveld]

Hi David,

Sorry to hear that the change caused confusion, but good that you noticed. 

I am aware that, with the daily updates and recent changes, that we (i.e. the whole fieldtrip team inside and outside Nijmegen) that can make changes to the code and commit them to the SVN version control system, are not always clearly communicating the relevant changes to the users. Important changes are usually discussed in our weekly fieldtrip meeting, and that is where we decide whether we shoudl send out an email to the list to explicitely make users aware of a particular change. This one slipped through. 

This particular change refers to http://code.google.com/p/fieldtrip/source/detail?r=2663

I think that internally (i.e. with the fieldtrip team) we should work on improving the communication about changes to the code to the users. We already use http://twitter.com/#!/fieldtriptoolbx, http://code.google.com/p/fieldtrip/source/list and at the bottom of the fieldtrip home page the changes are also shortly listed. But those short log messages often don't allow the users to distinguish whether it is a trivial or important change. The importance of the  change should also be made clear and should reach the user. Perhaps we would compile changelists as text files and include them in the distribution, and/or post a weekly mail to the email list with the changes. The challenge for us is that it should not be too much work, otherwise it won't work out in the long run.

Suggestions and ideas are welcome...

best regards,
Robert

PS Eric and I are preparing a piece of documentation (probably a FAQ) in which we'll clarify some of the issues on the unclear cfg options, intrepretation of the montecarlo test results and the two-tailed testing. There are some conceptual issues that are confusing and we will try to clarify those soon.   


On 18 Mar 2011, at 16:54, David Groppe wrote:

> Hi all,
>   I just discovered that at some point in the past few weeks,
> Fieldtrip's cluster-based permutation test code was changed so that
> now the p-values in stats{#}.negclusters or stats{#}.posclusters are
> adjusted to reflect the tail of the test (before the p-values in those
> fields were always for one tailed tests and inaccurate for two-tailed
> tests).  This came as a surprise and would have messed up some of my
> analysis scripts if I hadn't noticed.  When I download a new version
> of Fieldtrip is there a good way to see what's changed since the last
> version I downloaded, so that I can avoid such surprises in the
> future?
>     much thanks,
>         -David
> 
> -- 
> David Groppe, Ph.D.
> Postdoctoral Researcher
> Kutaslab
> Dept. of Cognitive Science
> University of California, San Diego
> http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~dgroppe/
> _______________________________________________
> fieldtrip mailing list
> fieldtrip at donders.ru.nl
> http://mailman.science.ru.nl/mailman/listinfo/fieldtrip