Dear Qiime 2 team,
We published DartUniFrac recently ( Megascale microbiome analysis with DartUniFrac | Nature Biotechnology ) and wonder if you can also add support for it. It is available as a bioconda binary already. see GitHub page here: GitHub - jianshu93/DartUniFrac: Approximate UniFrac via Weighted MinHash 🦀 · GitHub
Let me know if you have further questions.
Best,
Jianshu
Hey @jianshu93,
Thanks for reaching out! We aren't adding any new plugins to the qiime2 distribution right now, but happy to have this added to the library. Instructions on doing this can be found here; let us know if you have any questions!
Cheers 
Thanks for the information. So in any release in the future, no new packages will be added including core components like UniFrac? Therefore, there will be no new release. this is my understanding. Let me know if it is correct and if you need Rob to get this added. This is one of the most important distance for microbiome research. I see no reason not to add it in a new release.
Hey @jianshu93,
Apologies for any confusion, happy to elaborate on this a bit more. We currently support integration with new packages in a couple of ways, with the most common being to add community plugins (stand-alone plugins developed by 3rd-party developers) to the QIIME 2 library, which automatically tests plugin integration and compatibility with other plugins. This allows for the plugin to still be installed within compatible distribution(s), but the plugin development and maintenance remains the responsibility of the developer(s). This allows for us to provide compatibility and integration with new tools and packages without adding undue burden on our core development team to maintain more packages and plugins than they are able.
With that being said, scikit-bio may be a better target for direct integration if you are looking for this to be something like an addition or replacement for the current unifrac package. This is what we depend on for all of our distance metrics, so a future version update of scikit-bio would then include those updates.
Let me know if you have any questions on getting this added to the library; congrats on the new paper!
Cheers