Debhelper for R packages

[Gordon Ball <gordon@chronitis.net>]

I have written a prototype debhelper module for building R packages,
which can be found (for the moment) on github:

https://github.com/chronitis/dh-r


This is meant to provide feature parity with the existing CDBS macro
while adding some possibly useful extras:

 * automatic substvars for known dependencies
 * automatic generation of debian/ from an R package tarball

I also intend to support, but haven't yet got working:

 * automatic handling of dpkg buildflags
 * generation of autopkgtests without copy-paste errors

It might also be interesting to explore:

 * handling binary dependencies between R compiled extensions
 * (optionally) building vignettes


I have tested it with a reasonably large collection of d-science and
d-med R packages, from both bioconductor and CRAN, and it appears to
work. However, this is pretty much my first stab at perl so it would
certainly benefit from oversight from someone with perl experience.

I would be interested to hear from R package maintainers 1) whether it
works and 2) any features not listed above which you would be useful.



Gordon