GitLab

* All tools now have a longer description in the tool-specific help
  page.
* Arguments are now presented in groups and the order is the same
  across tools.

Furthermore:
* Fixed bug that rendered BGHomStats and BGEstimate with the -H
  option useless.
* The report of Allelefinder and BGEstimate is now written to
  sys.stderr by default. This means the report is now always
  generated (but it may be sent directly to /dev/null explicitly by
  the user). The big plus is that the progress of the tools is
  visible in the terminal when the tools are run by hand.

* New tool Blame can be used to find particularly dirty samples and
  to construct a DNA profile of the contaminator.
* Fixed bug BGCorrect that resulted in incorrect values in the
  *_add columns.
* BGEstimate and BGHomStats no longer crash if a library file is
  provided.
* SeqConvert can now use a different library file for the output,
  thereby offering some possibilities to update allele names when a
  library file gets updated.
* Replaced various uses of map() by generator expressions and
  listcomps for increased readability speed (although slightly).

* New tool BGHomStats computes statistics (minimum, maximum, mean,
  and sample variance) of noise ratios in homozygous samples.
* The default BGEstimate output format has been changed to be
  compatible with that of BGHomStats. The cross-tabular output
  format is still available as an option because it easily uses 90%
  less disk space. BGCorrect (and other future tools that use noise
  profiles) will work with both formats.
* Fixed bug in the --min-samples option of BGEstimate that could
  cause some alleles with less than the specified number of samples
  to be included if --drop-samples is used at the same time.
* The user now receives an error message if there are unknown
  arguments. The error message lists the usage string of the
  requested tool. (Argparse's default was to print the general
  FDSTools usage string, which is not helpful.)

* Unknown arguments are now silently ignored. If this results in
  the tool not being able to run, the usage information of the tool
  is printed instead of the general fdstools usage.
* Seqconvert no longer crashes on an empty line in the input.
* Libconvert now maintains the order of prefix/suffix sequences.
* Allele names with aliases other than 'X' or 'Y' are now correctly
  recognised. These were previously rejected as 'unknown format'.
* Fixed bug where a prefix/suffix other than the first listed in
  the library file was sometimes used as the canonical sequence.
* Sequence format conversion from raw to TSSV-style sequences now
  attempts to match the prefix, suffix, and STR pattern to
  non-matching sequences on a best effort basis. This is
  especially useful when converting to allelenames (which is done
  via TSSV-style sequences), since it results in an allele name
  that matches more closely the names of other alleles.
* Generating allele names for sequences that lack a prefix and/or
  suffix is now supported (by adding a variant description that
  deletes the entire prefix/suffix).

* Added BGCorrect tool for filtering noise in case samples.
* BGEstimate now writes its output in tab-separated format, instead
  of JSON.
* Small changes to help output formatting.

I could write about all its features here, but instead I will point
out some future plans to highlight the things that are possibly not
optimal in their current implementation.

There are a number of things I plan to change in the future:
* The output format is currently JSON, perhaps a carefully designed
  tabular format is a better choice. The benefit of switching to a
  tabluar format is that the data can be loaded into e.g. Excel as
  well.
* The profiles are currently produced separately for forward and
  reverse reads. I would prefer to integrate these into a single
  computation that estimates allele balance in the heterozygotes
  using both strands as well.
* I would like to add information about strand bias of the alleles
  as well. The most straightforward way to do this is to set only
  the forward reads of the true allele to 100 and treat the reverse
  reads the same as all background products. You will then obtain a
  number of reverse reads observed for ever 100 forward reads of
  the true allele.
* I think it would be appropriate to make sure the values in the
  allele balance matrices of each sample ('Ax' in the source code)
  should add up to 1. For homozygotes, it is currently a scalar 1,
  the sum of the elements tend to be more than 1. This means that a
  heterozygous sample has a stronger influence on the profiles than
  a homozygous sample.

* Allelefinder can now combine data from multiple files into a
  single sample (this happens when the same sample tag was
  extracted from their names).
* Allelefinder can now automatically convert sequences to a given
  format (this is optional though). This is particularly useful
  when combining the knownalleles.csv and newalleles.csv files of
  a sample. (Note that allelefinder still assumes that the files
  contain different alleles; no attempt is made to check whether
  the same allele was represented in multiple files.)

* Fixed crash when attempting to read a TSSV library from sys.stdin.
* Various large updates to allelefinder.
* libconvert now gives a useful default FDSTools library when given
  no input.

* Introducing a new, extended library file format to support
  allele name generation.  The new libconvert tool can convert
  TSSV libraries to the new format and vice versa.
* Added functions for converting between raw sequences, TSSV-style
  sequences, and allele names.
* Added global -d/--debug option.

Stuttermark updates:
* Stuttermark now automatically converts input sequences to
  TSSV-style if a library is provided.
* Stuttermark will no longer crash if there is no 'name' column.
  Instead, all sequences are taken to belong to the same marker.

New tools:
* libconvert converts between FDSTools and TSSV library formats.
* seqconvert converts between raw sequences, TSSV-style sequences,
  and allele names.
* allelefinder detects the true alleles in reference samples.

FDSTools v0.0.1 with Stuttermark v1.3.
Other tools will come later.