Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] cran2deb: 1700+ new Debian / R packages
On 24 July 2009 at 12:53, Andreas Tille wrote:
| On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 04:19:25PM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > The other unspoken point: no, I do not intend to submit 1700 packages to
| > Debian's NEW queue. It would take a lot more effort to properly manually
| > maintain these at full-strength distro quality, starting with the 1700+
| > debian/copyright files.
|
| [Late reply because I was offline for a while]
|
| I wonder whether your effort might result in some kind of preparation
| for manual builded official Debian package. It turned out that Debian
Hm, to me Debian and cran2deb are complementary. We "just" provide another
apt-get'able repo with builds for one flavour and two arches. Debian is more
general.
| has a certain set of CRAN packages and there is obviosely some need
| for this because people will define dependencies of non-CRAN packages
| from these.
Will they? For 'in-Debian' packages it would be a severe bug to depends on
'out-of-Debian' packages.
| IMHO it sounds like a good idea to use a cran2deb builded
| source package and add the needed files like copyright and most probably
| watch file (it seems clear to me that cran2deb has no use for watch
| files if it is building the latest version anyway).
cran2deb allows for per-package patches. We needed that to fix a handful of
corner cases. So one could create another similar mechanism to pull in
pre-existing changelog entries. I am unsure, however, how urgent that need
is. In the hypothetical case from a world with unlimited resources: sure,
why not? On this planet, I tend to think I may have other more urgent
matters to deal with.
| So I wonder if there is a chance to submit patches to cran2deb with
| these files to keep the code stored in one place, which means that you
| might integrate manually created copyright / watch files into cran2deb
| build system and DDs who want to build an official package just draw
| all the code from this unique source.
|
| Does this sound reasonable?
I don't know. For one thing, cran2deb creates packages with 1.2-1.cran.$x
versioning which is different (to allow for clear sorting). So this system
never creates 'Debian replacement packages'. I think time will tell how
cran2deb and Debian itself can morph together.
In the medium to long run, I think it is much more important to work on
things like install.packages() inside R to make the R-internal package
management aware of the Debian (or Ubuntu) package management layer. As
r-help and other venues demonstrate, way too many people still fail on
install.packages() or R CMD INSTALL source.tar.gz (for lack of -dev packages,
say) when they could have gotten the same package via apt-get.
Hth, Dirk
--
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
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