On 24 July 2009 at 12:53, Andreas Tille wrote: | On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 04:19:25PM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote: | > The other unspoken point: no, I do not intend to submit 1700 packages to | > Debian's NEW queue. It would take a lot more effort to properly manually | > maintain these at full-strength distro quality, starting with the 1700+ | > debian/copyright files. | | [Late reply because I was offline for a while] | | I wonder whether your effort might result in some kind of preparation | for manual builded official Debian package. It turned out that Debian
Hm, to me Debian and cran2deb are complementary. We "just" provide another apt-get'able repo with builds for one flavour and two arches. Debian is more general. | has a certain set of CRAN packages and there is obviosely some need | for this because people will define dependencies of non-CRAN packages | from these. Will they? For 'in-Debian' packages it would be a severe bug to depends on 'out-of-Debian' packages. | IMHO it sounds like a good idea to use a cran2deb builded | source package and add the needed files like copyright and most probably | watch file (it seems clear to me that cran2deb has no use for watch | files if it is building the latest version anyway). cran2deb allows for per-package patches. We needed that to fix a handful of corner cases. So one could create another similar mechanism to pull in pre-existing changelog entries. I am unsure, however, how urgent that need is. In the hypothetical case from a world with unlimited resources: sure, why not? On this planet, I tend to think I may have other more urgent matters to deal with. | So I wonder if there is a chance to submit patches to cran2deb with | these files to keep the code stored in one place, which means that you | might integrate manually created copyright / watch files into cran2deb | build system and DDs who want to build an official package just draw | all the code from this unique source. | | Does this sound reasonable? I don't know. For one thing, cran2deb creates packages with 1.2-1.cran.$x versioning which is different (to allow for clear sorting). So this system never creates 'Debian replacement packages'. I think time will tell how cran2deb and Debian itself can morph together. In the medium to long run, I think it is much more important to work on things like install.packages() inside R to make the R-internal package management aware of the Debian (or Ubuntu) package management layer. As r-help and other venues demonstrate, way too many people still fail on install.packages() or R CMD INSTALL source.tar.gz (for lack of -dev packages, say) when they could have gotten the same package via apt-get. Hth, Dirk -- Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-science-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org