ok check this out https://github.com/stevekm/nf-niceutils @Phil Ewels 🙂 you might like this maybe nf-core can use it or something

Yeah that was my first thought when I saw it on #C05QZ5J90SV - could imagine it turning into an nf-core utils plugin 😅

> As plugins get more common, I suspect that we will start to have to make decisions about whether we ship stuff as plugins or shared modules yes I have been thinking about this a lot as well obv you guys working with nf-core would know better but, it also seemed to me that there is some degree of risk with the Plugins in that it could end up requiring more involved support over time to keep them up to date especially considering, for example, that in your Plugin meta JSON you have to have a compatible version of Nextflow listed It seems that scripting things that run inside the Nextflow Workflow directly, might be "safer" from any potential drift of the Nextflow framework codebase itself. Even when writing the plugin, it was apparent that I was much more subject to the whims of both Groovy versions, and Nextflow library versions. if that is not a big deal, it seems that the plugins might be a really nice method for nf-core to make its utilities and helpers more portable and easier to use and access; you would not even need to use the nf-core

tools

to install and run it, after all. Also by using the Plugin method, you guys could ship features and improvements faster than the main Nextflow repo can implement the same features. That has some obvious downsides as well though another downside, of course, is the learning curve here. Its taken me about a month, maybe a little more, to figure this all out. Its a heck of a lot more complicated than stuffing functions in the

lib

dir ever was

Yup, all good points 👍🏻