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Re: R packages - are we doing the right thing?



On Wed, 29 Apr 2015, "Steffen Möller" wrote:
> 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?

I think we actually should switch to adopting the perl team approach,
and create a separate sub-team to package R packages in Debian. I've
been working (very slowly) on doing this, and would love more
contributors.

I'm currently leaning towards having two classes of packages; those
which just go directly to debian-r.debian.net, and those which we
actually upload to debian.

If we do that, packages can be promoted and demoted easily between the
two groups simply by changing a single .mrconfig file and doing a real
upload.

We could then leverage c2d to make the maintenance fairly trivial for
the packages, but still have the ability to make manual tweaks to
important packages as necessary.

> 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.

I think having an overarching single group is probably best, but we
should certainly have people from all of the different R related
disciplines involved... I definitely don't want to make anyone's job
harder.

-- 
Don Armstrong                      http://www.donarmstrong.com

All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.
 -- Gaius Julius Caesar in "The Conspiracy of Catiline" by Sallust


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