Re: Build-Depends for CRAN packages
On 21 August 2020 at 09:12, Johannes Ranke wrote:
| Am Freitag, 21. August 2020, 06:18:21 CEST schrieb Dirk Eddelbuettel:
| > Debian is independent of CRAN.
|
| Good point. But it would still appear reasonable to me to make use of our
| knowledge of the CRAN testing infrastructure when packaging for Debian.
|
| > So when I as a Debian developer upload to _Debian unstable_ we ensure it
| > builds with Debian unstable in order to migrate to testing in order to be
| > cast one day into a new stable release.
|
| I do not think that this build dependency is necessary for this. In my
| experience, CRAN packages build on the previous R version as well. Migration
| of binary packages can sufficiently be controlled by the r-api version as far as
| I understand.
I think I built our first r-cran-* package around 2003, almost seventeen
years ago. And since I always thought we could do better than we do---I fully
agree with you that the _existing CRAN checks_ are _de-facto_ sufficient.
Debian being Debian, as volunteers we (mostly) still treat each of the CRAN
packages individually. Which can never scale to CRAN size. Which means we'd
have to do something outside of Debian where we lack (build and host)
systems. A catch twenty-two. I once had a small grant to build something but
that never really got started simply for lack of time.
An interesting alternative approach is now available over in Fedora-land.
Inaki builds _all_ of CRAN. 16k binaries.
(And he has a clever littler R package 'bspm' on CRAN that "bridges to the
package manager"--and I helped with apt. On a properly configured packages
[see my r-bspm containers within Rocker] the install.packages() call now
dispatches to apt (for us) or dnf (for him). Pretty awesome as you now get
around 1k r-cran-* binaries [and some bioc] for Debian, and Michael's 4600+
r-cran-* binaries for Ubuntu. Attractive for R users who will reason in names
of R packages, things like automating CI and more. It's getting closer to a
wider announcement as it is already pretty useful as is.)
Dirk
--
https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd@debian.org
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