>>>>> "Allen" == Allen S Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>>>> on 24 Jul 2006 12:27:39 -0400 writes:
Allen> 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.
Allen> Thanks, Seth; I am hoping that I will be able to
Allen> avoid introducing any new data to the PACKAGES
Allen> stream. So far, I'm doing all right with
Allen> concatenating all the DESCRIPTIONS files from the
Allen> Descriptions/ subdir of a CRAN mirror.
Allen> I'm wondering about SystemRequirements, though; I
Allen> ass-u-med from its mention in 'Writing R Extensions'
Allen> that it was intended to have a format similar to
Allen> Depends. Some package authors seem to feel the same
Allen> way, but many clearly do not.
Allen> cran2ebuild $ grep -i systemre descs/PACKAGES
[.............]
Allen> So, 30-some out of 788 packages use
Allen> SystemRequirements. Clearly, a 'Depends'-esque
Allen> format is the most popular, though there are several
Allen> unparseable variants in the list.
Allen> I'm suggesting a tighter formatting to a few authors,
Allen> (i.e. the packages I happen to use right now) but I
Allen> wonder if there is any central philosophical opinion
Allen> on how that field ought to look? If the Gods of R
Allen> think that automated parsing of SystemRequirements is
Allen> unimportant, I'll have to maintain them by hand.
I think some R-core members would welcome a detailed proposal on
how 'SystemRequirements' should be formatted -- maybe even
accompanied by R code to parse it.
That's a topic also quite well fit to be discussed in "this theatre"
..
Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich
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