Re: getting some R packages into Debian

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@faheem.info>]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2013, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Hi Faheem,
>
> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 01:19:02AM +0530, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> > I never got a reply to this email.
>
> I hoped that my answer at
>
>  http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2013/08/msg00011.html
>
> would have clarified that you could perfectly follow Debian Med
> policy to add the R packages in question.  Charles also hat
> answered here:
>
>  http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2013/08/msg00166.html
>
> I hope that my document about *.rda packages here
>
>  https://wiki.debian.org/GNU_R
>
> might cause some twist in ftpmasters mind.  I recently had uploaded
> r-bioc-graph which also included *.rda files but it was rejected for a
> different reason because some copyright statement was missing.
>
> > My specific question is:
> >
> > I'm using the following R packages, which are not currently in
> > Debian, as described in the email below.
> >
> > yaml
> > gridExtra
> > RPostgreSQL
> > tikzDevice
> > RJSONIO
> >
> > If I want to get them into Debian via debian-med, what should I do?
>
> Just follow Debian Med policy as suggested previously and make sure you
> are checking out the various other examples of R packages we just have
> in VCS.
>
> > Would putting the packaging into some debian-med repository be a
> > good start? Thanks,
>
> Yes, please do.  This would be very welcome.

Thanks, Andreas, that is very helpful, particularly the 
https://wiki.debian.org/GNU_R link.

Question 1: tikzDevice was removed from CRAN for technical reasons, and 
the package development appears to have stalled, but it is still a very 
useful (indeed, indispensible for its purpose) package. Will this be a 
problem re Debian packaging?

Question 2: 
http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html#repositories only 
talks about Subversion and Git. Given that choice, I'd definitely go with 
Git, but is Mercurial out as an option?

I actually followed up on r-cran-munsell. I think Benjamin Eikel had the 
ball last, but didn't get a very helpful response from the last people he 
talked to. Benjamin, what is your next move on this?

                                                          Regards, Faheem