Bug#333683: O: octave-statdataml, r-cran-statdataml, and r-cran-xml
Package: wnpp
Severity: normal
Some time ago I packaged StatDataML (http://www.omegahat.org/StatDataML/)
for Debian hoping that it would be a solution for communicating data between
Octave and R. The current version of the statdataml package (1.0.9) still
has me as maintainer, although I already put the sources in the SVN
repository of the Debain Octave Group (http://pkg-octave.alioth.debian.org).
In the meanwhile, I started using exclusively HDF5 for transferring data
between Octave and R and I think this is a superior approach, not to mention
the fact that I am now also able to use Perl to read/write the data files.
The statdataml source package generates two binary packages:
octave-statdataml and r-cran-statdataml. This last one depends on
r-cran-xml, which I also packaged for Debian.
Now, the scoops:
1) Both r-cran-statdataml and r-cran-xml have been made available by the
Debian BioCondutor Group (http://pkg-bioc.alioth.debian.org/). BTW, the
versions present in their apt-getable repository
(http://public.pzr.uni-rostock.de/~moeller/mirror/) are more recent than
those packaged by me.
2) The newest upstream version of StatDataML 1.0-10
(http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Descriptions/StatDataML.html) even
does not contain the Octave part which was present in 1.0-9.
3) The Octave part of StatDataML 1.0-9 even does work correctly with g++
4.0. I do not know whether the problems comes really from octave 2.1.71,
from libxml2 in sid, from the compiler, or from a combination of all
those. I do not have the time/interest in debugging this problem.
4) A bug report has been recently filed against r-cran-xml
(http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=330622). This is an
upstream problem and I even do not know whether the most recent upstream
version of the fixes it. (Again, my time/interest on this is very
scarce).
Under all this circumstances, I am abandoning the StatDataML packages as
well as r-cran-xml. This orphaning bug report against wnpp is the first
step before asking for removal of the packages from the FTP archive.
--
Rafael
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