Announcing cran2deb: 1700+ Debian packages from almost all of CRAN
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Last Friday's presentation at UseR! 2009 was the first really public mention
of 'cran2deb'. It provides Debian packages of all of CRAN. It started as
Charles' project from last year's Google Summer of Code, was further extended
by us over the last year.
We currently build for the testing distribution and the i386 and amd64
architectures. This is now publically useable and we welcome wider testing
by Debian users. We hope to extend this to Ubuntu during the summer or fall.
I include what I blogged earlier (which you may have seen via Planet Debian
and/or Planet R). This also contains the /etc/apt/sources.list entries:
cran2deb: Would you like 1700+ new Debian / R packages ?
As I mentioned in my [8]quick write-up of UseR 2009, one of my talks
was about cran2deb: a system to turn (essentially) all [1]CRAN packages
into directly apt-get-able binary packages.
This is essentially a '2.0' version of earlier work with Steffen
Moeller and David Vernazobres which we had presented in 2007. Then, the
approach was top-down and monolithic which started to show its limits.
This time, the idea was to borrow the successful bottom-up approach of
my [2]CRANberries feed.
The bulk of the work was done by Charles Blundell as part of his Google
Summer of Code 2008 project which I had suggested and mentored. After
that project had concluded, we both felt we should continue with it and
bring it to 'production'. The CRAN hosts provided us with a (virtual
Xen) machine to build on, and we are now ready to more publically
announce the availability of the repositories for i386 and amd64:
deb http://debian.cran.r-project.org/cran2deb/debian-i386 testing/
and
deb http://debian.cran.r-project.org/cran2deb/debian-amd64 testing/
A few more details are provided in [3]our presentation slides. We look
forward to hearing from folks using; the r-sig-debian list may be a
good venue for this.
References
1. http://cran.r-project.org/
2. http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries
3. http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/papers/useR2009cran2deb.pdf
Please direct questions to r-sig-debian (which has subscriber-only posts) or
debian-science.
Regards, Dirk and Charles
--
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
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