Seth Falcon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > For the Bioconductor project, we also wanted more information to be > programatically available regarding the packages in a repository. > Instead of bloating the PACKAGES file, we put a separate file, VIEWS > in our repository. [...] > > So, if you were able to host a CRAN mirror, you could annotate it > similarly.
Thanks, Seth; I am hoping that I will be able to avoid introducing any new data to the PACKAGES stream. So far, I'm doing all right with concatenating all the DESCRIPTIONS files from the Descriptions/ subdir of a CRAN mirror. I'm wondering about SystemRequirements, though; I ass-u-med from its mention in 'Writing R Extensions' that it was intended to have a format similar to Depends. Some package authors seem to feel the same way, but many clearly do not. cran2ebuild $ grep -i systemre descs/PACKAGES SystemRequirements: currently the only supported OS is Windows, we expect to support Linux in future releases SystemRequirements: libgd (>= 2.0.28 http://www.boutell.com/gd/), recommended: freetype2, fontconfig and msttcorefonts SystemRequirements: GNU make SystemRequirements: WinBUGS 1.4 on Windows SystemRequirements: Internal files Xba.CQV, Xba.regions (or other regions file) SystemRequirements: netcdf (>= 3.5.0), udunits (>= 1.11.7) SystemRequirements: An ODBC driver manager and drivers. See README. SystemRequirements: QuantLib library from http://quantlib.org, Boost library SystemRequirements: LamMpi(>= 6.5.9) or Mpich2(>= 1.0.2), BLAS, BLACS, ScaLAPACK SystemRequirements: Java 1.4 or later SystemRequirements: Windows, WinEdt SystemRequirements: None SystemRequirements: Platform LSF development libraries SystemRequirements: linux: libtiff (and libtiff-devel); windows: Tiff (libtiff3.dll), zlib1.dll and jpeg62.dll; see also the topic 'SoPhy' in the documentation SystemRequirements: libxml2 (>= 2.6.3) SystemRequirements: gmp (>= 4.1.4) SystemRequirements: GNOME development libraries, R built as a shared object. SystemRequirements: ghostscript SystemRequirements: Gnu Scientific Library version >= 1.5 SystemRequirements: SVMlight SystemRequirements: mim (>= 3.2.0.6) SystemRequirements: Will use djmrgl or rgl packages for rendering if present SystemRequirements: GMP (GNU MP bignum library), cddlib SystemRequirements: SystemRequirements: for building from source: GDAL >= 1.3.1 library from http://www.gdal.org/download.html and PROJ.4 (proj >= 4.4.9) from http://www.remotesensing.org/proj/ SystemRequirements: GGobi SystemRequirements: OpenGL, GLU Library, libpng (optional) SystemRequirements: libtiff SystemRequirements: SystemRequirements: xgobi must be installed additionally, So, 30-some out of 788 packages use SystemRequirements. Clearly, a 'Depends'-esque format is the most popular, though there are several unparseable variants in the list. I'm suggesting a tighter formatting to a few authors, (i.e. the packages I happen to use right now) but I wonder if there is any central philosophical opinion on how that field ought to look? If the Gods of R think that automated parsing of SystemRequirements is unimportant, I'll have to maintain them by hand. - Allen S. Rout ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
