Re: RFS: r-cran-partitions (NEW)

[Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>]

Hi,

I'd like to cover only those items not commented by Nilesh (I fully
agree what he said in his mail).

Am Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 04:41:47PM +0000 schrieb Torrance, Douglas:
> On Thu 30 Sep 2021 10:47:16 AM EDT, Nilesh Patra <nilesh@nileshpatra.info> wrote:
> > I happened to notice that you added a uversionmangle rule to convert "1.10-2" to "1.10.2"
> > this is not good, we are not supposed to convert hyphenations into "." for R packages,
> > as this goes counter-productive, for managing dependencies etc.
> > There has been a consensus on this already in the team.
> 
> Oops!  I didn't realize this and just made the change based Lintian's
> hyphen-in-upstream-part-of-debian-changelog-version warning

May be we should file a bug against lintian that this warning should
not be issued (about changelog as well as the one in d/control about
versioned dependencies).

> and reading that,
> in R, '-' and '.' are equivalent for sorting version numbers.  It's even
> mentioned in the old Debian R policy [1] as an option: "Alternatively, the
> hyphen in the CRAN version can be translated into a dot yielding `a.b.c-d'."

I think the term *old* is the significant part of the statement above
and it should be more clearly pronounced that it was issued as a "RFC on
first public *draft*" which would need a lot of comments - or rather
some rewrite since several things are not valid any more (for instance
also the "The Debian source package can in most cases retain the
<Rpackage> name." is discouraged in the pkg-r team since we always use
the r-cran- prefix).  Such a document should also point to the

   prepare_missing_cran_package

script of the dh-r package which simply does the right job to create an
R package.  I feel some urgency to write down such things ... but well,
that's as always with documentation.
 
> When would an epoch be necessary?

It would be necessary for package r-cran-pbdzmq (see bug #898037) since
you are not the only one who tried to "enhance" the versioning scheme
(there are other examples[3]).  We could fix the version number by using
an epoch but since this is only the "last resort" we are hoping for a
higher version bump in those packages (unfortunately these are not
updated regularly by upstream).

> It seems like the dot/hyphen issues I'm
> seeing searching through the list archives (e.g., [2]) are in the opposite
> direction, i.e., upstream uses a dot in a versioned dependency when our
> package uses a hyphen.

We just use the version as choosen by upstream.
 
> I guess my question is, would it be ok to just wait for, e.g., sets 1.1-1 to
> be released to switch r-cran-sets to use a hyphen?

Asking for rejection as long as it is not accepted seems the less
cumbersome choice to me.
 
> Thanks for noticing this!

+1

Kind regards

     Andreas.

 
> [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/12/msg02332.html
> [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-r/2018/06/msg00069.html
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/r-pkg-team/maintenance-utilities/-/blob/master/outdated_r-packages.txt
    (seek for "do not mangle")


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