On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 14:46 -0500, Allen S. Rout wrote: > > Pierre-Yves <pin...@pingoured.fr> writes on R-devel: > > > One of them is R2spec [1], which I have worked on. I would also > > point you to a 'fork' of R2spec [2] which aims at building RPM more > > than spec (reason why they did not merge). R2spec aims a helping to > > generate spec files as close as possible to the final one for > > inclusion in official Fedora/EPEL repositories. Allen S. Rout have > > made a nice job converting R2spec to generate RPM directly, solving > > some of the circular dependences issues.
> I appreciate your kind mention of my effort, Pierre-Yves. Thank you! That's because I appreciate them :) > > I am dissapointed that you don't see a merge in the future. I would > like to change that if I can. What would you like me to change? I will for sure include some of the change you have made (like using the regular expression instead of my crappy (but working) implementation). IMHO the problem comes from what you want to achieve and how I see R2spec. You want to build a build tool which is able to build R RPM in a chain way resolving the dependencies. This is great ! But this is R2rpm not R2spec ;-) IMHO R2spec is here to help packagers to create/generate spec file as close as possible to the Fedora standards. Fedora's RPM will never be generated fully automatically and be maintained without human intervention that's against its philosophy. So your tool is I believe really interesting if we want to set up an external repository out of the official Fedora repository in which we would be able to use your tool. There are already some projects hanging around in bioinformatics which try to do so (I have in mind the BioRPMS [1], the biolinux [2] or the BioConductor RPM repo [3]). The problem is that most of the time they do not respect the standards asked by Fedora. One example which appears in your application is the %file section of your spec. In order to be able/allow the user to do an rpm -ivh R-*.rpm --excludedocs we marked a number of files as being documentation. Using your spec it is not possible. This is fine, for an external repository but not for inclusion in the Fedora repository. > It is my hope that the R2spec code will make it possible, eventually, > to build and maintain _all_ the CRAN packages as RPMs, without the > extensive by-hand treatment they now get. I understand that, if this > is to happen, more folks than just me need to be happy with the > code. :) What I think we could do, is actually set up a repository of RPM for CRAN, for Bioconductor external to the official Fedora repositories where your tool would be used and very much appreciated. I am part of the project on bioinformatics.org ([3]), and if you are willing to give it a shot I believe we could sort something out. On my side time available is really small but I believe we could find some more people willing to help for such project. My position has always been and is still to push packages to the official repositories rather than creating another place and thus dividing the forces. But I have seen the questions of the availability of R RPMs more than once, people contacted me. I unfortunately have not seen them coming into the Fedora packaging world, maybe it is time for me to accept this fact and accept to push for an external repository maybe as a transitional phase before inclusion into Fedora. I hope I have been clear on how I see the difference between your tool and mine and where I stand at the moment. I would be pleased to hear from the people of this list what they think about this problematic (also considering what Debian has done). Anyway thanks again for your work. Best regards, Pierre [1] http://informatics.umdnj.edu/BioRPMs/ [2] http://biolinux.org (down atm) [3] http://www.bioinformatics.org/r-repo/wiki/ _______________________________________________ Fedora-r-devel-list mailing list Fedora-r-devel-list@redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-r-devel-list
