Re: Debhelper for R packages

[Gordon Ball <gordon@chronitis.net>]

Moving forward with this, I propose to file an ITP for dh-r as a
standalone package shortly, barring any objections. Since this shouldn't
overlap with anything else, I would to go straight to unstable rather
than going via experimental.



## Repository

Mirrored to alioth [1], and this is the canonical VCS url given in
d/control.

[1]: https://anonscm.debian.org/git/debian-science/packages/dh-r.git


## Vignettes

A vignette dh sequence item is provided which should build vignettes,
but it has to be explicitly requested. To use this you need to add a
complete texlive environment to the build-depends, since this isn't a
dependency of r-base-dev (won't someone please think of the buildds).
This should also work with vignettes using knitr (but not rmarkdown,
since it isn't packaged).

%:
    dh $@ --buildsystem R --with vignette


## dh-make-R

This has gained options to generate team-maintenance for debian-science
or debian-med, and several styles of autopkgtests (and interactive help).

dh-make-R --team science --tests run_unit_test,vignette


## convert-to-dh-r

(Renamed from fix-deps.pm). This is only installed to /usr/share/dh-r,
but will try and convert existing d/control files (although I wouldn't
recommend using it in bulk without manual review, since it's pretty
primitive).


## Buildflags

I was unable to inject hardening LDFLAGS options via the MAKEFLAGS
environment option, so for the moment you'll still see
hardening-no-bindnow. I don't think hardening is that high a priority
for R, but this can be revisited later if someone has a better idea
about how to do it.




While I have done a certain amount of testing, doubtless there are still
some pitfalls left. Caveat emptor.

Gordon