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

[Uwe Ligges]

Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 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 ...


I mean WinBUGS runs under Wine and is somehow controlled from rbugs in R 
running in native mode under Linux. Hence the package is not 
platform-specific.


>>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?

Yes. I agree. But we have to invent something like the dependency field 
in the current DESCRIPTION file. Then the question is how to distinguish 
between different platforms. Is a distiction "windows"/"unix"/"mac" 
sufficient? Probably not (something that runs under Windows XP and does 
not under Windows NT, someting that runs under Linux but not under 
Solaris or AIX, ......... and then there is cygwin .....)

Is it really worth the effort to invent something for 
platform-dependence-management for those few packages?
Note that R CMD INSTALL, R CMD check, CRAN scripts, scripts from 
repository maintainers etc. all need to be changed.

At least I can live with the fact that R CMD check results in an error 
on any unsupported platform.

Uwe



> Dirk
> 
>