I am thinking of packaging stan and rstan, and would appreciate some advice.
stan is a program for doing Bayesian analysis with a variant of hybrid/Hamiltonian monte carlo. http://mc-stan.org/ homepage; https://github.com/stan-dev/rstan.git and https://github.com/stan-dev/stan.git for code. It looks to me as if there are substantial parts of the source that should not be in the debian source; http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/best-pkging-practices.html#bpp-origtargz indicates this is possible, but not generally advisable. I'd appreciate feedback on how to handle this both in policy terms--what if any parts should I omit, and practical terms--best mechanics of doing this with an upstream git. Most of the other packaging documentation I've reviewed is silent on this topic (except for mentioning some git-specific helpers). In particular, stan includes a lib directory of external libraries. I assume a debian package should use already packaged versions of those libraries. I'm assuming stan has not locally modified the libraries. Also, rstan includes stan as a subproject; I assume I would package the source would not. Though perhaps one source could be used to build stan and rstan. The system itself is fairly complicated; stan works by translating a program into C++ and then compiling the program at run-time. Also, it includes a library as well as a front-end program. rstan an R package designed to call stan from R. It is set up so that one downloads the R package and, while installing it in R, the whole stan system gets built (so the R library source includes all of stan). The directory structure of rstan is a bit odd; the "real" R library source is in https://github.com/stan-dev/rstan/tree/develop/rstan/rstan, with the higher directories having meta-stuff (maybe the web page and tools for building the package including stan). I'm not a debian developer, but I figured since I was interested in using the package I might as well try to package it. stan is not listed for wnpp. Comments or suggestions welcome. Thanks. Ross Boylan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
