[R-sig-Debian] [ANNOUNCEMENT] cran2deb: 1700+ new Debian / R packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Michael,

On 14 July 2009 at 18:44, charles blundell wrote:
| 2009/7/13 Michael Rutter <mar36 at psu.edu>
| > 1.  Are there any negatives going from an install.packages("foo")
| > approach using R then switching to an apt-get install r-cran-foo
| > method of installing packages?  If I install a deb package on top of
| > an R installed package, will there be issues?
| 
| This should be the same as installing the package twice via R CMD
| INSTALL; I don't expect any issues but I cannot guarantee that I have
| not forgotten something.

Right. R_LIBS aka what you see via .libPaths() in R simply makes it possible
for those in /usr/local/lib/R/site-library [installed via install.packages()]  
to shadow those in /usr/lib/R/site-library. I can't remember if R is now
smart enough to pick the highest version; it may.  At some point in the past
the 'first one found' seemed to win.  So in sum:  no harm, other than maybe
missing the newest.  We insured that different locations are used which the
man years of co-existence with r-cran-* packages in Debian possible. We
simply extend this now.

Longer term, some real work may need to go to make install.packages() aware
of the OS's package management system. That better work well though...

| > 2.  What will it take to do this for Ubuntu?  Are we going to need a
| > (virtual) machine for each release or can this be done under chroot
| > jails on one server?
| 
| I think, though have never got very far, that differences in package
| naming will be the main technical problem with supporting Ubuntu in a
| similar fashion, assuming re-use of the excellent Debian tools
| (pbuilder, mini-dinstall, etc) with a different set of base packages.
| 
| Each release (i.e., debian i386 testing) requires a chroot
| environment: it could all be done on one machine. We simply use
| pbuilder. Maybe you would not want to do this for too many releases
| (bandwidth, disk space, cpu time).

More details to follow but I may have access to some institutional support
for this. No details yet though.

Cheers, Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.