[ImageJ-devel] 'Freeze' button

[Michael Doube]

Hi everyone,

One of the things which has bugged me for a while about Fiji in
particular and which might affect IJ2 is that it is quite hard to define
the state of the program when you have to describe it in a scientific
paper, because there aren't atomic versions easily accessible to users,
which encapsulate the entire state of the IJ system.

You could, I suppose, go to Help > ImageJ and get the IJ and Java
versions, and then go to Help > About plugins and get some information.
But, that relies on plugin authors including a method containing that
info, which they often don't do.

Further, what happens when libraries are changing in the back end, which
don't relate to those version numbers, but which those plugins might
use? Or when they use methods from other classes unbeknown to the user?

In other words, if you want to repeat the experiment, how do you restore
the conditions and get the code configuration back? Is copying the whole
Fiji.app directory the only way?

I am imagining a Git-like hash which relates to a unique configuration
and which anyone can reproduce by entering the same hash - like checking
out a commit, you would check out a config.

Michael