Re: Sub-backports? ... and the state of R in jessie-backports.
Le Fri, May 26, 2017 at 01:51:16PM +0200, Steffen Möller a écrit :
> For Debian Med we have a similar situation, not as bad though, as with
> the Django packages: Strong inter-dependencies between packages. This
> happens whenever there is some kind of framework has a non-monotonic
> feature change. Our Django is R. It is mostly fine, but when we are not
> careful, then an update of R in backports would require many other
> packages to compile or to be updated.
Hi Steffen and everybody,
I would say that we are careful, but sometimes unexpected things happen,
and it takes more than the time of migration to Testing to get aware of
them.
To be honest, I am quite sure that r-base 3.3.3-1~bpo8+1 currently in
jessie-backports breaks a significant amount of r-bioc-* and perhaps
r-cran-* packages from Jessie. Well, actually, Jessie contains r-base
3.1.1-1+deb8u1 and the use of packages compiled with R 3.x is not
supported with R 3.x+1; experienced users are supposed to know this, and
some users install only r-base and do not rely on Debian of the r-cran*
and r-bioc* pakages, so a backport has its role to play anyway. I am
also fully aware that using Breaks: etc. would be better; what blocks me
at the moment is that I am struggling to install debci on a local
machine to automate the run of regression tests in the context of jessie
+ jessie-backports.
Thanks for listening about the state of the R universe in Debian :)
> we need something for communities
> that have their very own understanding of what a release is that is
> mostly independent from the underlying OS. Ubuntu can get there via
> their PPA infrastructure but I find that confusing since the user does
> not know what PPA to trust and which not so much. My subject line was a
> bit of a provocation, but could we think about a concept that would both
> be close to the distribution and allow for the needs of particular user
> community?
The plan for "bikeshed" PPAs announced years ago was great, which would
allow for blending packages by a mixture of uploads like for
stable-backports and imports like for testing migrations, and would make
an efficient use of the package pools in the Debian archive so that the
same package in two bikesheds would not take double space. But I am
definitely not in a situation to implement this by myself.
Have a nice day,
Charles
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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