Revise decision record: sorted_sequences about refget HOT 2 OPEN

Ok, I can definitely clarify that rationale better, or tone down the dismissive language. It may actually be useful to try to dissuade people from using this, because, in my opinion, using this is a bad move that is less useful than using the other, better features of sequence collections. So, I think the dismissive language here may be warranted and useful and instructive, but I haven't effectively explained why/the alternative.

To understand your use case, one thing I'm confused about: You're looking to compare coordinate spaces:

"do these resources represent variants in the same coordinate space?".

But then wouldn't you use sorted_name_length_pairs? It's exactly for looking for shared coordinate systems. I guess you're saying you don't have sequence names -- but if there are no sequence names, then you don't have a coordinate space at all, and I don't see how you have variant definitions, either. How can you describe variants without sequence name? The variants have to annotate a certain sequence in the collection. So I'm missing your point here. You'd need sequence names, and sorted_sequences won't help you anyway, right?

A few other thoughts:

• You're neglecting the complexity of subsets -- what if one collection has an additional sequence added? Then the digests won't match anyway. I think you're overestimating the probability that people have different collections with the same sequence content, but in different order and with different names and no extra or missing sequences in the collection, which are the requirements you'd need to match on sorted_sequences. On the other hand, all this information is immediately provided by the comparison function.
• The comparison function can be calculated even if the service only recognizes one of the digests, as long as you have the canonical representation of the other. If you don't have either representation, then that's where you have the problem. For that situation, we would need 'meta-servers' that broker digest requests to servers. But I think even if you're using sorted_sequences, you're still going to be in this situation a lot of the time, due to the above point.

from refget.

I toned down the dismissive language in the ADR :)

from refget.