[R-pkg-devel] Overcoming CRAN's 5mb vendoring requirement

[Ivan Krylov]

В Wed, 8 May 2024 16:01:23 -0400
Josiah Parry <josiah.parry using gmail.com> пишет:

>    - I'll see if I can get the configure.ac to make the appropriate
> Rscript call for configure.win.
>       - I think the idea of having a single `confgure.ac` file to
> generate both configure and configure.win is nice. Guidance with
> GitHub actions and ChatGPT is essentially a must for me since my bash
> is remedial at best.

Then you might like Kevin Ushey's configure
<https://github.com/kevinushey/configure>, which is like autoconf
redone in R. The only few lines of bash are the system-specific bits in
{configure,cleanup}{.win,} to run the R scripts under tools/, and they
are already written for you.

Generating two system-specific configures from one configure.ac might
be possible - GNU m4 is very versatile - but to implement that, you
would have to program m4, which is even more niche than bash.

> The requirement to avoid GitHub feels surprisingly anachronistic
> given how central it is to the vast majority of software development.

I think that Ben Bolker's answer explains it very well. Part of the
goal of the CRAN archive is to be able to take a package, a
period-appropriate version of R and install the former on the latter.
The URL carrying the code must be able to survive as long. Unlike
Zenodo, GitHub's goal is not directly to provide storage forever, and
its current owners have a reputation [*] that could have played a part
in the requirement to avoid them.

I wonder if it would be ethical to use Archive.org for this.

In an ideal world, CRAN would be able to directly archive larger
software packages (just like PyPI is currently hosting more than a
terabyte of Tensorflow builds and a few terabytes more of other
GPU-related code [**]) without requiring the maintainers to swim
between the Scylla of vendoring the dependencies and the Charybdis of
making the build depend on an external URL, but that's a luxury someone
would have to pay for.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan

[*]
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2024q2/010708.html

[**]
https://discuss.python.org/t/what-to-do-about-gpus-and-the-built-distributions-that-support-them/7125/16