[Bioc-devel] Tensorflow support for bioconductor packages

[Kieran Campbell]

Hi all,

Rstudio have released the Tensorflow package for R -
https://tensorflow.rstudio.com/tensorflow/ - and we have started
incorporating it into some of our genomics packages for the heavy
numerical computation.

We would ideally like these to be submitted to Bioconductor, but
there's a custom line required for Tensorflow installation in that
after calling

install.packages("tensorflow")

then Tensorflow must be installed via

tensorflow::install_tensorflow()

which would break package testing if tensorflow was simply imported
into the R package and wasn't already installed. Is there any way to
customise a package installation within Bioconductor to trigger the
tensorflow::install_tensorflow() ?

As more people use tensorflow / deep learning in genomics I can see
this being a problem so it would be good to have a solution in place.

Many thanks,

Kieran Campbell