Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] cran2deb: 1700+ new Debian / R packages
On 24 July 2009 at 16:22, Andreas Tille wrote:
| On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 08:48:05AM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > | 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.
|
| Sure - there are cran (*not* cran2deb) packages just in Debian and other
| packages depend from them. I just wanted to say that it does not make
| sense to drop any R packages because there might be competing cran2deb
AFAICT nobody suggested that...
| packages. I'm just thinking in terms of enhancing the quality of the
| Debian internal subset of all software available via CRAN.
|
| > 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.
|
| Well, my suggestion is far from urgent. I just thought loudly about how
| Debian might make some use of your effort instead of regarding it as only
| complementary to Debian
|
| > 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.
|
| Sure. My way of thinking was that the maintainer of an official Debian
| package just draws the source from cran2deb, ads a changelog entry and
| is finished with his work (in an ideal situation).
One would _at least_ need a proper debian/copyright. That step is fairly
impossible to automate.
But I am not sure how meaningful / desirable it is to just "stuff" packages
from cran2deb into Debian. If and when something is generally useful, and
preferably used by the maintainer, then by all means maintain it. In which
case the few minutes of creating debian/ are not that much work, as has been
shown by the 100+ r-cran-* packages already in Debian.
Dirk
--
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
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