R packages bottleneck: finding the source for PDF and Rda files.
Hi Steffen, Don and Dirk,
I think that a R module packaging team would be great and would help to keep
things up to date.
The main bottleneck is to check if all the contents of the package are free,
and to keep on doing it at each and every upload. For example in my
experience, authors sometimes suddenly remove the source of the PDFs once their
package becomes a bit heavy by Bioconductor's (and probably CRAN's)
standards...
In addition, if a source tree contains R files in the data directory, the
command `R CMD build` will execute them and convert them in binary objects (the
`Rda` files). Unfortunately, what we usually receive as “the source” is the
product of `R CMD build`, which in that scenario is non-free from Debian's
point of view.
The best solution for us would be if the R community would help us to access
the sources of the PDF and Rda files, for instance by asking the R package
authors to provide a link to a public repository containing them, etc.
Do you think that this has a chance to happen ? Or do you see a better
solution ?
Have a nice day,
Charles
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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