[R-sig-Debian] Ubuntu cran2deb PPA

["Steffen Möller"]

Hello,

> On Mon, 11 Feb 2013, Mathieu Basille wrote:
> > To be complete, I found a third package that was unavailable to
> > installation through aptitude, although it was listed in the Debian
> > R Package Archive: extrafont [1], although the dependencies
> > extrafontdb and Rttf2pt1 were available and installed without any
> > problem. See my system info in the previous message.
> 
> Right. If the binary package doesn't exist, this usually means that
> there was a failure of the package build for some reason. I have to
> then go back through, see why the binary build failed, and fix the
> database so that the source package gets the proper changes for the
> next go-round. [Unfortunately, I still haven't fixed cran2deb to pull
> the source package from the archive if it exists instead of trying to
> rebuild it, but eventually I'll get to that point. In the meantime,
> you can just let me know the package name, and I'll look into it
> specifically instead of getting to it as I have extra time.]

With so many flavours of distributions and backports with slightly different library names etc., or just with all those conflicting updates kicking in without prior notice, we just have to accept that it takes an awful lot of time and monitoring to curate all those packages.

I came to the conclusion that a) this is too much work for a spare time activity and b) that quite a lot of how to do it right is similar to how Debian/Ubuntu already works. The PPA concepts is something that Debian wants to have for quite some Google-summer-of-codes back and I completely agree that it fits well also with cran2deb.  What was missing when I last looked at cran2deb was an inter-distributional/inter-release specification of how build- and run-time-dependencies should be speficied. That added, and with a common server, there is little speaking against just working on the same code base, from what I oversee.

Many greetings

Steffen