Re: [gentoo-science] sci team help

[Sébastien Fabbro]

On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 06:57 -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> 1. I'm not sure the idea of integrating, say, R packages, into Portage
> is a good one. Debian has a lot of R packages in their repository, but
> that's mainly because one developer, Dirk Eddelbuettel, took that on as
> a personal mission. For that matter, I don't know that Portage really
> *needs* to have "tight" integration with any other package management
> systems. In other words, does a CPAN Perl package really need to be
> wrapped in an ebuild, or could a Gentoo user just as easily install CPAN
> packages directly? The same goes for Ruby gems -- it's only marginally
> more convenient for a Rubyist to have gems in Portage, and you'll never
> have them *all. If you have the developer resources, sure, why not, but
> aren't there better things the developers could be doing? In any event,
> I use R and its packages heavily and don't see the need to "emerge
> Rcmdr" -- R's native package management system is fine. So is Ruby's
> "rubygems" package management system.

Not saying 100 R packages  => 100 ebuilds, but passing proper flags,
building deps and all could be wrapped in a nice gentoo way (btw, is
paludis doing this?). Anyway this was just a project idea in a todo list
and should go to another thread, or the corresponding bug. 

> 2. Don't be afraid to kick something out of the distro if nobody wants
> to maintain it. It's no big deal to install a package from upstream
> source. As far as I'm concerned, in most cases the only difference is
> that it ends up in /usr/local instead of in /usr and I have to manually
> load the dependencies.

This is also an area where we could use some help. Do you feel any
packages are unmaintained or could be removed? If yes, file a bug, say
your word on the wiki, ...

-- 
Sébastien