Hi, at first thanks to Steffen for raising this question I was stumbling upon previously as well.
On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 08:06:01AM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Wed, 29 Apr 2015, "Steffen Möller" wrote: > > I would like to have > > http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/index.html > > for Debian, which is rather fashionable these days, but looking at the > > dependencies, I refrained from packaging it for Debian Med's R directory. > > It becomes too much, I thought. And we should not need a sub-blend > > for R packages :) > > > > To my rescue, Don Armstrong maintains http://debian-r.debian.net/ , > > i.e. a repository of auto-created R packages, and I happily found the > > package there. Now, for anything we want in Debian Med we cannot allow > > for dependencies to external sources - tcR comes to mind as a reverse > > depdendency for data.table. > > > > Is anything coming to your minds how we could make use of Don's effort > > for Debian Med? > > I think we actually should switch to adopting the perl team approach, > and create a separate sub-team to package R packages in Debian. I've > been working (very slowly) on doing this, and would love more > contributors. I really appreciate this idea and I also had suggested something in the past in this direction. The only point is that I personally do not feel qualified to lead this effort since I have only very rudimentary knowledge in R. While packaging R packages is quite simple I can do this easily but I think some more R skills would not harm for a person triggering this kind of effort. I for myself will happily support this and would move all R packages I had touched in the past into a Debian R team repository. > I'm currently leaning towards having two classes of packages; those > which just go directly to debian-r.debian.net, and those which we > actually upload to debian. > > If we do that, packages can be promoted and demoted easily between the > two groups simply by changing a single .mrconfig file and doing a real > upload. While I for myself have not yet used mr I'd gladly adapt such a workflow. > We could then leverage c2d to make the maintenance fairly trivial for > the packages, but still have the ability to make manual tweaks to > important packages as necessary. > > > Could we possibly use Don's repository for bits and pieces to upload > > to the distribution? It would require an overseeable change to c2d to > > ensure that c2d knows to be in charge over updates despite a presence > > of the package in the distribution, and maybe we have some extra > > information for debian/control and debian/copyright, but then we could > > have a selected few manually monitored packages auto-built for the > > distribution. Other communities may find their own respective set of > > packages. > > I think having an overarching single group is probably best, but we > should certainly have people from all of the different R related > disciplines involved... I definitely don't want to make anyone's job > harder. As far as I see you suggestion I think the work will not be harder if you are maintaining code in a VCS anyway. Switching the VCS URL should be an easy task. To add to Steffens initial question I also came across previously. From my personal view the following reasons are a (strong) pro for keeping R packages in Debian: 1. You can Depends / Recommends such packages (which we are heavily doing in Debian Med and Debian Science) 2. You can run a test suite via autopkgtest which guarants a constant testing on Debian systems. IMHO both things are quite important - specifically if we are talking about scientific software. Apropos testing: I have some hope that #752609 might have better chances to get fixed if we create an R team working on this in a dedicated VCS. Don, thanks a lot for your great suggestion Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: https://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
