Release notes for Sierra v0.3
-----------------------------

Sierra v0.3 is a major release which adds a lot of functionality
to the system.  Major changes are:

- Added support for barcoding within samples

- Greatly expanded the range of recognised file types

- Added support for storing budget information and pulling this from
  a separate database

- Added fields to record the adapter type with each sample

- Added a reporting screen to the admin view

- Added an option to make the sample queue publicly visible

- Added support for authenticated SMTP for email delivery

- Aded more email notification options

- Added interactive data extraction from files to present useful
  information in the lane view

- Added support for a single instrument being able to have runs
  containing different numbers of lanes.

- Removed the user option to set a number of lanes to run since it
  caused too many problems.  Admins can still set this.



Release notes for Sierra v0.2
-----------------------------

Sierra v0.2 adds support for the new folder layout provided in Casava
v1.8. The program will look for files in the Aligned and Unaligned
folders underneath the main run folder. In order to be able to find
the files associated with a specific lane Sierra requires that the
standard naming scheme for projects and samples is used, rather than
a custom name from a user-defined sample sheet.  Basically if you 
process your runs without specifying a sample sheet you should be OK.

In addition the other major addition in this release is a new script 
which allows you to backup the important parts of your data. The
script "backup_sierra_data" can be found in the scripts directory and
will pull out all of the files shown to the user in the Sierra UI and 
copy them to a location you specify.  This should be useful either to
back up your data, or to filter a full run folder to extract only the
files you need to keep Sierra running.

In addition we have fixed some other problems which were reported in
the initial release.

There are no database updates in this release so upgrading from v0.1 
should simply be a case of overwriting the existing installation with
the new files from the v0.2 release.  Alternatively you can unpack the
new file separately and then copy over your sierra.conf file into the
new structure.


Release notes for Sierra v0.1
-----------------------------

This is the first public release of Sierra, although the system has been
acting as the primary LIMS for the Babraham Institute sequencing facility
for around 6 months, so the code has received some stress testing.

This release should provide a fully functional sample tracking environment,
although in its current state it is still tied to some assumptions about 
Illumina sequencers (8 lanes per flowcell etc).  The results parsing is
also only implemented for Illumina run folders and has been tested up to
SCS2.5 (OLB 1.8).  With the changes due in OLB 1.9 it's likely that some
updates to the parsing rules will be necessary in order to correctly 
identify the files associated with each lane - however these will be able
to be applied retrospectively, and won't affect the sample tracking parts
of Sierra.

If you find any problems with Sierra then please report them either into 
our bug tracking system at:

www.bioinformartics.bbsrc.ac.uk/bugzilla/

...or directly to simon.andrews@babraham.ac.uk