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On Thursday 18 March, Auke Booij wrote: |
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> 1. R package installer (also see gentoo-wiki.com). R has a lot of |
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> additional packages, so it is not feasible to manually create and |
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> maintain ebuilds for all of them. There are a number of databases |
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> containing these additional packages, including CRAN and Bioconductor. |
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> Three reasonable solutions are: 1. create a big ebuild with loads and |
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> loads of USE flags which compiles and installs the wanted R packages |
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> as one big package (not the best, since this is exactly what we want |
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> to avoid with Gentoo, and we would indeed need loads of use flags), 2. |
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> generate ebuilds for all packages (this would need regular running of |
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> scripts, and would probably need for its own overlay), 3. install to |
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> the filesystem without letting the package manager know about anything |
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> (ehm... I guess this is not a reasonable solution, after all). Are |
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> there any ideas about how to solve this, and how R usually installs |
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> them? Sebastien fabbro, I cc'd you, are you still interested in |
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> mentoring this? |
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Hi, |
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CRAN/Bioconductor support in Gentoo is definitely something worth |
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exploring and has been requested by several Gentoo users. |
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Solutions 1. and 3. are not something I would pursue. With the |
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thousands R packages to deal with, you would want either on-the-fly |
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ebuild generation or the package manager to directly deal with the CRAN |
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format (which is I think what the paludis folks started doing until CRAN |
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changed its format again). Any solution leading to complex handling, |
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the users will return to the R CMD INSTALL quickly. |
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Keep in mind that one of the main reason not to use the R default |
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package management system but a Gentoo one is to get R-external |
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dependencies from the portage tree. |
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I am not sure I will find time to mentor the full Summer. If anyone |
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applying for this project makes a good application, I'll push this to |
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my fellow devs to give a hand in the mentoring process. |
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-- |
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Sebastien |