Added deprecation notice

[rishidev]

At a GA4GH Meeting it was decided to formally halt work on the Reference Server

[ljdursi]

I'd hope that decision could be revisited at the plenary...

[kozbo]

I agree, this does deserve some discussion at the Plenary, though effectively, development has already halted. My team has been reassigned with other priorities. My team believes that the reference server is not meant to be a product. It provides one example of how one might implement a server to support the GA4GH data APIs, but we do not feel that it is a supportable development path. There are much more flexible and light weight approaches that can be taken.

The UCSC team has shifted its attention to studying the best ways to collect and provide access to RNA data via the HCA GA4GH driver project. We are also working on the GA4GH DREAM challenge for establishing APIs for reproducible workflows.

The opinions above do not prevent someone else from picking up the torch to extend or support the reference server.

[ljdursi]

@kozbo - I agree with what you’ve said; I’d just like to see deprecation held off (and merging of PRs continue) until something(s) else appeared that this code base could be deprecated in favor of.

[rishidev]

At a meeting on the future direction of the GA4GH GitHub and related matters, we had a discussion which was unanimous in how to proceed with the GitHub reference schema/server/test suites going forward. GA4GH itself is reorganising as a standards organisation. The master/working branch are 1000+ commits out of sync which noone has the engineering resources to reconcile. The plan is to extract schemas that will need future development, and focus on smaller, focused implementations of these items.

For full details see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DKktWM7QiAisALxWddUqqTRmlC7zgl-5A0yqveXJljM/edit