Ongoing Development

Objectives

The DendroPy library provides a stable and reliable foundation for phylogenetic computing, ensuring robustness in diverse applications. We prioritize user-friendliness for experienced and novice bioinformaticians alike through easy installation, universal portability, expressive API, comprehensive documentation, versatility, and extensibility.

Governance

DendroPy currently operates under a founder-leader model where project decisions are driven by consensus within a small group of core maintainers. Although this governance structure suits the project’s scope and objectives at present, we are open to exploring alternate options as the DendroPy project and community continues to develop.

We are committed to actively involving the DendroPy user community in project decision-making. Please use the DendroPy Issues page to suggest features and highlight important library use cases. Keep up with announcements via our DendroPy Announcements mailing list and contribute to broader discussion through our DendroPy Users mailing list.

Roadmap

Version 5.0

Our upcoming major release focuses on modernizing DendroPy and improving its maintainability. In addition to various development infrastructure improvements, we intend to drop official Python 2 support and finalize removal of several deprecated library components.

Long-term Goals

Possible areas of future development include:

  • improved interoperability with other Python phylogenetics libraries

  • performance improvements, perhaps through JIT compilation compatibility

  • integrations to support emerging machine learning phylogenetics workflows

  • implementations of recently-introduced phylostatistics and models