R packages - are we doing the right thing?
Hello,
I would like to have
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/index.html
for Debian, which is rather fashionable these days, but looking at the
dependencies, I refrained from packaging it for Debian Med's R directory.
It becomes too much, I thought. And we should not need a sub-blend
for R packages :)
To my rescue, Don Armstrong maintains http://debian-r.debian.net/ , i.e. a
repository of auto-created R packages, and I happily found the package
there. Now, for anything we want in Debian Med we cannot allow for dependencies
to external sources - tcR comes to mind as a reverse depdendency for data.table.
Is anything coming to your minds how we could make use of Don's effort
for Debian Med? In the past, we had discussed the R packages and their
packaging per se. We were looking for solutions for the whole of CRAN/BioC/Omegahat.
For Debian Med, this is not required. Something else has changed in that
many projects are now in github, which may facilitate communicating with
upstream to help automated Debian compatibility are becoming more easy to
communicate.
Could we possibly use Don's repository for bits and pieces to upload to the
distribution? It would require an overseeable change to c2d to ensure that c2d
knows to be in charge over updates despite a presence of the package in the
distribution, and maybe we have some extra information for debian/control and
debian/copyright, but then we could have a selected few manually monitored
packages auto-built for the distribution. Other communities may find their
own respective set of packages.
Best,
Steffen
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