Re: Need for maintainers
On Mon, Feb 15, 2021 at 08:59:42AM -0500, Eric Brown wrote:
> 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.
BTW, I will have a Debian packaging workshop at FOSSASIA online meeting
Timing: 19 März, 2021 14:00 (CET) - 19 März, 2021 17:00 (CET)
May be I should advertise this a bit more here. I will have another
packaging workshop one week earlier but it will be in German language.
> 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?).
Good catch. I've added these to Recommends in git[1]. However, I'm
wondering whether this might bloat automatic build environments (or are
these installed with --no-install-recommends?) Comments are welcome
what others might think about this Recommends.
> I also needed to configure git and
> export DEBFULLNAME and DEBEMAIL environment variables.
Yes, that's correct. I hope you were facing the according FIXMEs in
d/changelog as expected. Any better clue how to teach users about this
would be welcome.
> 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.
Happy to hear so. You need a bit of experience if there is a bigger
tree of dependencies to package but that should be bearable.
> 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.
Also happy to hear this. :-)
> Is the next step for me to push the git to a new repo on the r-pkg team salsa?
There is the script /usr/bin/salsa in the devscripts package. However,
for pure historic reasons I (and several other team members here) use
https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/community/helper-scripts/-/blob/master/inject-into-salsa-git
The tools are a bit separated since invented in different teams. But
you can download this script and run it inside the root of your new git
repository. It should do everything correctly - provided you are a
member of the R-pkg team and have permissions to create a repository.
You also want to file an ITP bug report for your package which you
can do easily by using
itp_from_debian_dir
(in dh-r package). However, its possibly advisable for pedagogic
reasons that you do it at least once manually by
reportbug wnpp
and follow the menu.
Hope this helps
Andreas.
[1] https://salsa.debian.org/r-pkg-team/dh-r/-/commit/c9aa3c2ebee0af84be4db4dd77099e36af4a921f
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