When a user uploads a new App, it gets placed in the "pending apps" table in the database, which has a field "works_with".

This field is meant to contain a string indicating which version or version range of the IGB platform the App requires.

Currently, this value is being set to a default value of 9.1.0, the upcoming release of IGB.

Instead, this value should be set using the IGB platform version indicated in the App's repository.xml and MANIFEST.MF files. (App repository.xml and App MANIFEST.MF should contain the same information regarding imported dependencies.)

Potentially useful suggestions and comments:

• Seems like the repository.xml file would be much easier to parse because the data are more structured. Since we now require the repository.xml file to be included in the uploaded jar file, let's parse repository.xml to get the platform versions. Why not?

• For now, let's use the version syntax word-for-word as provided by the repository.xml file, e.g., [10.0.0,11.0.0) or whatever. We will report that to the user as-is. It's not very user-friendly, but I have a feeling biologists and users will "get" what it means. And later on we can come up with a more user-friendly format. For now, we just need to report the platform version to the user – and to us, for testing.

• We can use the repository.xml "require" tag with "name" equal to "package" to identify IGB platform dependencies.

Probably most packages that an IGB App can legally import from the platform has package structure of org.lorainelab.igb.*.

So we could maybe write a regex that would extract the version strings for every imported org.lorainelab.igb package used by an App.

We should look at all of them, and require that all such packages use the same version strings.