[R] building RPMs for R packages

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

Cooper Bethea <cooper.bethea at duke.edu> writes:

> the reason i need to build a package here (and the reason any other sys.
> admin on an rpm-based system should) is because packages not installed
> under rpm have a chance of breaking during system upgrades. in order to
> maintain my sanity, i need to know that package R-foo needs to be
> upgraded when i upgrade packages R, dependency blah, dependency blah,
> and i need rpm to know that so my install tool will do it automatically.
> if it doesn't my users' jobs will break and they will yell at me and i
> will cry. the methods you propose are not scalable.
> 
> 
> > 
> >     Cooper> so could someone who's built R extension RPM
> >     Cooper> packages give me some pointers? a SRPM for a package
> >     Cooper> would be invaluable.

Actually, the problem of making sure that N computers all have the
same set of RPMs installed is not terribly scalable either...

Centralized software maintenance is a pretty obvious thing to do, but
I often suspect RedHat (and several others) of not really having
grasped the idea of having computers connected in a net. Mixing the
two maintenance models is probably not good, I tend to agree with you
on that.

You might want to take a look at the scripts that Dethlef did for
creating RPMs of contributed packages on SuSE. Another option that I
think should work is to take the spec file that builds R and modify it
to do a BioConductor install after making the main binary, giving you
a "mega-R" RPM with everything included.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907