What can I say, g-cran works and everything from here on is just improvement over what existed already. I got the base of the project like I wanted it, stable and reliable, although the R package installer doesn't do some specific things quite how I'd like it to.
So the current code simply calls R to build and install packages. A compatibility ebuild uses the package name to find the R package, which is then fed to R. I must say that although this is a bit hackish, it works very nicely. Should you want to give this code a spin, the ebuild is in the gentoo-science overlay. Once you've installed g-cran, create a new overlay and cd into it, then: #mkdir profiles #echo "cran" >> profiles/repo_name #g-cran . sync http://cran.r-project.org #g-cran . generate-tree Make your favorite package manager read this new tree and you should be able to install some packages. Soon to come is proper parsing of the License field, proper translation of dependencies (the current code assumes a dependency on foo means a dependency on dev-R/foo) and installing /usr/share/doc files correctly. Specifically the first and the last I'll be focusing on for this week, but not unimportantly, development on g-common, which as you may remember is the piece of software I'll hopefully be writing with wiktor_b and iElectric to organize non-ebuild package installations, will continue next week. Exams will also be over, so after this week I will be spending loads of time making dependencies parse correctly and package managers handle g-cran fluently. For the next three weeks or so, I'll be able to entertain myself finishing the important parts of g-cran and writing g-common. After that, I'd really like to do some QA, and perhaps write some package-fixing scripts, since a lot of R packages have incorrect syntax. As I'm writing this, some roommates are already yelling our national anthem, so right now I'm off to watch football ("Kijk, de bal moet minimaal tussen die twee palen.").
