Hi Gordon, R is not team maintained and Dirk is not reading all threads on Debian Science - make sure you CC him (as I did) if you want to be sure he notices your mail.
On Thu, Sep 08, 2016 at 03:30:20PM +0200, Gordon Ball wrote: > I have written a prototype debhelper module for building R packages, > which can be found (for the moment) on github: > > https://github.com/chronitis/dh-r > > > This is meant to provide feature parity with the existing CDBS macro > while That's very welcome and I confirm that I'd happily convert the packages I'm maintaining to this debhelper module. > adding some possibly useful extras: > > * automatic substvars for known dependencies That's very appreciated and helps definitely to prevent errors since sponsees as well as I myself forgot to sync Build-Depends with Depends (versioned and unversioned). I verified that the package works as expected at least with the random example r-bioc-affy. > * automatic generation of debian/ from an R package tarball This could save even more time to create R packages and should prevent cut-n-pastos. > I also intend to support, but haven't yet got working: > > * automatic handling of dpkg buildflags To make sure I understand fully what you want to describe: Are you talking about hardening flags etc? > * generation of autopkgtests without copy-paste errors Cool! What about running the tests also as Build time tests (see #752609). > It might also be interesting to explore: > > * handling binary dependencies between R compiled extensions What exactly do you mean here? I admit I'd welcome if this dh module would be available in sid soon to enable switching packages to it to get it fully tested soon. This kind of features might wait for later versions. > * (optionally) building vignettes Might be nice for additional testing but also not really needed in a first usable version. > I have tested it with a reasonably large collection of d-science and > d-med R packages, from both bioconductor and CRAN, and it appears to > work. I'd be happy if you would commit this work once dh-r is available to spare me some duplicated work. > However, this is pretty much my first stab at perl so it would > certainly benefit from oversight from someone with perl experience. > > I would be interested to hear from R package maintainers 1) whether it > works and 2) any features not listed above which you would be useful. I think I answered this above. Thanks a lot for your very welcome work Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de