[R] debian /etc/apt/sources.list for CRAN?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 01:39:23PM -0500, Michael Friendly wrote:
> Should I just delete the cran.r-project.org line
> above, 

I think so.  Plus, if you already point to Debian unstable, CRAN has nothing
you wouldn't have otherwise.

> or are there debian R packages elsewhere on CRAN that I should 
> include instead?

Not that I know of. 

In the past, CRAN had current Debian packages of R itself for Debian
flavours other than unstable which typically has the most current R version
right at release time. However, migration to testing can take time so the we
sometime kept the same . And for stable we used to have volunteer-donated
rebuilds of the current R. This has gotten progressively more difficult as
Debian stable got older and older, and process of creating the R packages
started to take advantage of facilities to available to the versions of the
tools in stable.

We have talked at times about providing more CRAN packages as Debian
packages, and possibly via CRAN itself rather than full Debian uploads. But
I have not had time to work on that for a while, and that is unfortunately
rather unlikely to change soon.  Others have expressed an interest in
helping as well but haven't gotten very far, unfortunately.

Fellow Debian maintainer Matt Hope, has started a project on Debian's alioth
host (that is open to non-Debianers who want to contribute) to coordinate
debianisation of BioConductor. As this would use the same infrastructures,
it could get used for CRAN too. But this project is also slow in progressing
-- we're all overworked volunteers in this.  

Right now I'd say this is waiting for someone with a real itch to scratch.

Regards,  Dirk

-- 
Better to have an approximate answer to the right question than a precise 
answer to the wrong question.  --  John Tukey as quoted by John Chambers