Bug#659163: r-base-dev: Please enable using ${R:depends} substvar in r-cran.mk

[Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org>]

Package: r-base-dev
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch

Hi,

as discussed on the mailing list starting at

   http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2012/02/msg00074.html

I'm providing hereby the patch which would be quite helpful for all R
packages maintained by the Debian Med team and several of Debian Science
team.

Remark: The patch is totally non-invasive to any existing package.  It
just appends the R version which was used to build the package to
debian/$(package).substvars.  If you do not use ${R:Depends} in your
debian/control file the patch has no effect at all and I can not see
any chance to break any existing package.  I have tested the patch
with one arch=all and one arch=any package.

Thanks for considering the patch

       Andreas.

diff -ubrN r-base-2.14.1.orig/debian/r-cran.mk r-base-2.14.1/debian/r-cran.mk
--- r-base-2.14.1.orig/debian/r-cran.mk 2012-02-08 21:30:52.000000000 +0100
+++ r-base-2.14.1/debian/r-cran.mk      2012-02-08 21:23:23.000000000 +0100
@@ -61,6 +61,9 @@
                 ## create the target directory
                dh_installdirs          $(debRdir)
                 ##
+               ## create R:Depends substvar containing used R version
+               echo "R:Depends=r-base-core (>= $(shell R --version | head -n1 | perl -ne 'print / +([0-9]\.[0-9]+\.[0-9])/')~)" >> debian/$(package).substvars
+               ##
                 ## call R to install the sources we're looking at
                 ## use this inside xvfb-run if this wrapper is installed
                if test -f /usr/bin/xvfb-run; then                      \


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.4
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.36-xenU-4814-i386 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash