Re: Need for maintainers
Dear all,
Thank you for the warm welcome and helpful advice. With your direction
I believe I've successfully locally packaged some R packages.
> I am not sure if I have missed a reply, just in case that I happen to be
> the first: Welcome! Everyone is a bit busy with the upcoming Debian
> release, please forgive.
Thanks very much Steffen.
> Debian always needs hands and brains. I just hope your contribution will
> not end with R packages once you are familiar with that process. Is
> there a package you would be particularly like to see added to/updated
> in the distribution? If not then I would find something for you.
Thanks again, as above I was thinking some of the more popular and
missing rOpenSci packages deserve a place in Debian. Having built R
packages in the Debian repo has saved me in the past. Additionally,
since I am most familiar with R packages over other software, I
thought it was a good place to start to learn the process of deb
packaging. The software I wish were in Debian (e.g. Zotero,
shiny-server) are too complex for me to help with currently.
On a fresh Debian unstable VM, I installed dh-r and ran the
prepare_missing_cran_package script. I found that I also needed to apt
install cme and git-buildpackage for it to work properly (maybe these
should be dependencies of dh-r?). I also needed to configure git and
export DEBFULLNAME and DEBEMAIL environment variables.
My thought is that it would be helpful to have more rOpenSci CRAN R
packages in Debian, since these are generally well reviewed,
maintained and promoted. So for practice, I ran
prepare_missing_cran_package on codemetaR. I saw that it automatically
found the CRAN dependencies that were not in Debian and also packaged
those. In this case, it packaged pingr. pingr is a utility package
which needs C compilation and sees a fair amount of activity on
Rstudio's mirrors, so it was good practice and might be a good
candidate for inclusion into Debian. prepare_missing_cran appeared to
work well, with manual intervention required to replace the FIXME in
the Debian copyright file to match the R package copyright file.
To test that it compiles/builds properly, I downloaded the original
tarball from CRAN and renamed it, then ran debuild. There were no
errors and I was able to then install the .deb and run the package in
R without error.
Is the next step for me to push the git to a new repo on the r-pkg team salsa?
Warm regards,
Eric
On Sun, Feb 14, 2021 at 12:15 PM Steffen Möller <steffen_moeller@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> Hi Eric,
>
> Am 14.02.21 um 00:10 schrieb Eric Brown:
> > I am a maintainer of a few R packages on CRAN and am interested in
> > becoming more involved in Debian, but do not currently have any Debian
> > packaging experience. Is there a need for additional maintainers in
> > this Debian R group? And if so, is there a resource that describes the
> > best practices for maintaining R packages in Debian?
>
> I am not sure if I have missed a reply, just in case that I happen to be
> the first: Welcome! Everyone is a bit busy with the upcoming Debian
> release, please forgive.
>
> Debian always needs hands and brains. I just hope your contribution will
> not end with R packages once you are familiar with that process. Is
> there a package you would be particularly like to see added to/updated
> in the distribution? If not then I would find something for you.
>
> You may want to read:
> * https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer - which will allow you to
> update your package
>
> * https://wiki.debian.org/GNU_R - with references on how to create new
> packages.
>
> You may want to just install the "dh-r" package and within that package
> find the script
> dh-r: /usr/bin/prepare_missing_cran_package
>
> This basically does the job for you, just pass the package name as an
> argument.
>
> Surprisingly readable is the Debian policy. This is basically the data
> sheet for all the files within the debian subdirectory.
>
> Best,
> Steffen
>
>
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