[Rd] declaring package dependencies

[Matthew Dowle]

On Sep 16, 2013, at 01:46 PM, Brian Rowe wrote:

> That reminds me: I once made a suggestion on how to automate some of the CRAN
> deployment process, but it was shot down as not being useful to them. I do
> recall a quote that was along the lines of "as long as you don't need help,
> do whatever you want", so one thought is to just set up a build server that
> does the building across the three versions of R, checks dependencies, rebuilds
> when release, patch, or devel are updated, etc. This would ease the burden on
> package maintainers and would just happen to make the CRAN folks' lives easier
> by catching a lot of bad builds. A proof of concept on AWS connecting to github
> or rforge could probably be finished on a six-pack. Speak up if anyone thinks
> this would be useful.

Yes useful. But that includes a package build system (which is what breaks on
R-Forge). If you could do that on a six-pack then could you fix R-Forge on a
three-pack first please? The R-Forge build system is itself an open source
package on R-Forge. Anyone can look at it, understand it and change it to be
more stable. That build system is here :

https://r-forge.r-project.org/R/?group_id=34

(I only know this because Stefan told me once. So I suspect others don't know
either, or it hasn't sunk in that we're pushing on an open door.)

Matthew