[R-sig-Debian] plans for lenny-cran? can I help?

[Johannes Ranke]

Hi Piet,

sorry for not answering in more detail the last time. Let me make a few
additions (I cut some stuff from the thread, in order to avoid noise):

> Addition: with lenny almost (14feb) released I do want to upgrade to lenny,
> now or in the weeks to come. 
> We're talking 40 or so systems with 24/7 availability.
> When you're uning etch-cran, updating to lenny is an issue.
> That's where a potential lenny-cran could help.

I have just set up the chroot to start building lenny-cran. It might
still take me some time though. In the meantime, I have updated the
pinning guidance in the README.

> All systems run etch with etch-cran on top of it. Above, more than 150 R
> packages were compiled locally and offered over nfs.

Great indeed!

> > | When trying to upgrade from etch to lenny with etch-cran packages installed
> > | things block on etch-cran dependencies.
> > 
> > Can you provide details?
> 
> Of course. 
> 
> Take 1: lenny with etch-cran

As you experienced, this is problematic, as the dependencies in
etch-cran were tailored to etch.
 
> Take 2: lenny with R packages (and some other) from sid.
> 
> This solves the libgfortran1 problem of course. gpc (== 4.1) can be installed;
> gcc-4.1-base upgrade.
> This upgrade needs tcl/tk 8.5 (lenny has 8.4 by default, but provides 8.5) and
> the newer pcre (7.8, lenny has 7.6) suite. Lenny keeps the default tclsh
> pointing to tclsh 8.4, I may need to change that to 8.5. Same for tk.
> python-biopython needs python-tk which needs tk8.4 (or even 8.3) with python
> at 2.5.2 (lenny) level. 
> To make sure the locally compiled extension packages also use tcl/tk8.5,
> I'll try installing tcl/tk8.5-dev but not tcl/tk8.4-dev.

On my lenny systems, tcl/tk 8.5 was not pulled by the sid R packages,
only the pcre from sid. Did you make any progress on the tcl/tk issues?
 
> In the meantime I upgraded one system to sid's r-* packages. Spent the rest of
> the day recreating our local R extension package repository for use on lenny
> systems. All worked well *given the right *-dev packages of course).

Is this OK now?
 
> Btw, the cran README files (e.g. bin/linux/debian/README{,.html}) are not
> mirrored, at least not to the Utrecht mirror. 

I tried a few other mirrors, and they are OK. I suggest contacting the
admin of the Utrecht mirror, and/or Stefan Theussl
<stefan.theussl at wu-wien.ac.at> from CRAN.

I hope everything is running well at your end meanwhile,

Johannes