[R-sig-Debian] R-3.4.0 and recommended packages

[Charles Plessy]

Le Thu, Apr 27, 2017 at 07:24:18AM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel a écrit :
> 
> On 27 April 2017 at 13:58, Johannes Ranke wrote:
> | Am Donnerstag, 27. April 2017, 06:32:13 schrieb Dirk Eddelbuettel:
> | > On 27 April 2017 at 12:01, Johannes Ranke wrote:
> | 
> | > This may be a use case for r-api-4. Or not as it doesn't break _all_
> | > packages so I am not sure we should force _all_ packages to be rebuilt.
> | > 
> | > Can we not find the ones that use .C and .Fortran ?
> | 
> | I do not understand how the use of r-api-x works, but my feeling is that it 
> | will not allow to differentiate between packages using .C and .Fortan and the 
> | rest.
> 
> Right. And therefore cast too wide a net. 
> 
> | I am surprised that I did not see a related bug report in the Debian BTS yet, 
> | did I overlook something? I only looked for r-base.
> 
> They may not know yet. I should write to debian-devel.
> 
> Any debian-med or debian-science readers here?

Yes I am here :)

I spotted the breakage caused by R 3.4.0 when seeing regression tests
failing on ci.debian.net.  But I did not report them yet as I am still
busy with the breakage caused by R 3.3.3 (mostly on Bioconductor packages).
In the case of R 3.3.3 it was a bit tedious to identify which packages were
to rebuild because some test failures were only indirect consequences, and
a pacakge responsible for the failures had its own tests passing because
their coverage was shallow... Hence for 3.4.0 I would say that in doubt,
let's rebuild everything.

If r-base starts to provide r-api-4 instead of r-api-3 then it will not be
co-installable with the r-cran/bioc/other-* packages until they have been
rebuilt.

 - The benefit is that it will prevent people doing partial upgrades
   from Stable, that would break their packages.

 - The drawback is the extra work of rebuilding the packages that do not
   use .C and .Fortran.

Within the Debian infrastructure, the architecture-dependant packages can be
easily rebuilt by binNMUs.  The architecture-independant packages are easier to
rebuild than before, because it is now possible to do source-only uploads.
Also, it may be worth asking on debian-devel if binNMUs of arch-independant
packages will become possible (since we now have autobuilders that can handle
them).  For the Debian packages provided on CRAN, I am not familiar on build is
trigger, so I can not comment on the ease of rebuilding.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan