[Rd] RE: [Rcom-l] rcom 0.97 available for download

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 04:40:46PM +0200, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 09:39:29AM -0400, Liaw, Andy wrote:
> >
> >>Would it make sense to have platform specific packages in a separate area 
> >>on
> >>CRAN?  I don't know of anything other than Windows that understand COM.
> 
> The question is: What exactly is platform-specific?

Platform-specific means what it says -- works only on a given platform (or
maybe a few).  Or are trying to pull a Clinton here: "it depends was your
meaning of platform is" ? :)

> >Yup, and 'core' CRAN contains at least one Windows-only package: rbugs [ as
> >I found when working on a script to automagically build Debian packages 
> >from
> >CPAN packages, the script is a modified version of Albrecht's script ]
> 
> The author told me that rbugs is intended to work with WinBUGS under 
> wine on a linux system  (whereas I'm pretty sure R2WinBUGS is capable - 

Think about it, what does 'run under wine' mean?  Do you get it: it ain't no
native package when it needs an emulator.

Saying it runs under Linux using wine is like claiming your car just turned
into a boat. While it will float once driven into the river, I presume it
won't float for very long ...

> Where's the point not to have just this one source repository related to 
> platform dependency?

Precisely. Let's have one source repo but _let us label any and all binary
restrictions_ more clearly so that I for one can skip over stuff that may
build for you [ Windoze ] but won't for me [ Linux, preferable on all all
ten to twelve hardware platforms supported by Debian for packages that get
uploaded ].  

Does that make sense? Would it improve over what we currently have?

Dirk


-- 
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
                                                -- Groucho Marx