On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 21:26 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote: Hi Dirk,
> UseR! 2007 at Iowa State University, Ames, IA, August 8-10, 2007 [...] > II. Paper / presentation on 2000 new Debian packages -- > "Would you like 2000 new Debian packages with that?" > ======================================================== > > Something we hadn't really reported back to Debian is the relative success > and current status of the 'pkg-bioc' project at Alioth. [...] > The big news is that we can now build most of the around two thousand source > packages [ around 900 from CRAN and 1100 from BioC, I concentrate more on > CRAN; Steffen focusses more on BioC, and David does everything ] for R from > the CRAN and BioConductor archives. That's what our paper that I presented > was about, as well as an earlier presentation / paper Steffen gave two months > ago in Italy [1]. [...] > The big question is what to do with these 2000 packages. The process is > still too manual and fragile to be called 'production class'. Eventually > this should move somewhere -- either CRAN itself, or, less likely, be part of > Debian. I do say less likely here because I don't hink that two-thousand > machine-generated packages could reach the Debian QA standards. They are > also, as a large class, too esoteric. CRAN, on the other hand, builds > binaries for Windows, so this could be a better fit. Someone suggested > R-Forge -- which is a rather recent 'SF / Alioth for R' based on Debian's > gforge packages. Also, one question had to do with how to avoid 'waits' for > new packages -- people wouldn't want to wait for packages to reach testing > when this can take months. So a distinct backport service may be the best > option. Manpower and mirrors may be the crux. First of all I really like your efforts of debianizing R packages. I think debian is currently well suited to be used in ``science'' but yes there is a lot more one can do. I was indeed missing the nowadays quite standard bioconductor packages when I had to do some microarray analysis. Regarding machine generated debian packages it is a first step and probably the only way given this amount of R-packages. I also don't think they could be in debian. This especially holds for the more esoteric/brand new research/unstable R-packes. However I would want to see the more mature bioconductor packages in debian... Thinking about it, *I* think it would be best to proceed in a similar way as the texlive people, i.e. have debian packages for all major categories which include the major mature R-packages of that category r-bioc-base r-bioc-microarray r-bioc-annotation r-bioc-statistics r-bioc-graphs r-bioc-technology The remaining R-packages could be packaged as single debian-packages as you proposed to do it and maybe even hosted a bioconductor.org? In case a package seems more mature it can enter any of the categories and one could add proper conflicts/replaces as an upgrade path. BTW, this also solves the `not-up-to-date issue', as more mature packages don't require weekly/monthly updates. Soeren -- For the one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic. -- Arthur C. Clarke, 1962
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