[gentoo-soc] Re: Two ideas: R package installer (CRAN) and per-user daemons

[Sébastien Fabbro]

On Thursday 18 March, Auke Booij wrote:

> 1. R package installer (also see gentoo-wiki.com). R has a lot of
> additional packages, so it is not feasible to manually create and
> maintain ebuilds for all of them. There are a number of databases
> containing these additional packages, including CRAN and Bioconductor.
> Three reasonable solutions are: 1. create a big ebuild with loads and
> loads of USE flags which compiles and installs the wanted R packages
> as one big package (not the best, since this is exactly what we want
> to avoid with Gentoo, and we would indeed need loads of use flags), 2.
> generate ebuilds for all packages (this would need regular running of
> scripts, and would probably need for its own overlay), 3. install to
> the filesystem without letting the package manager know about anything
> (ehm... I guess this is not a reasonable solution, after all). Are
> there any ideas about how to solve this, and how R usually installs
> them? Sebastien fabbro, I cc'd you, are you still interested in
> mentoring this?

Hi,

CRAN/Bioconductor support in Gentoo is definitely something worth
exploring and has been requested by several Gentoo users.
Solutions 1. and 3. are not something I would pursue. With the
thousands R packages to deal with, you would want either on-the-fly
ebuild generation or the package manager to directly deal with the CRAN
format (which is I think what the paludis folks started doing until CRAN
changed its format again). Any solution leading to complex handling,
the users will return to the R CMD INSTALL quickly.
Keep in mind that one of the main reason not to use the R default
package management system but a Gentoo one is to get R-external
dependencies from the portage tree.

I am not sure I will find time to mentor the full Summer. If anyone
applying for this project makes a good application, I'll push this to
my fellow devs to give a hand in the mentoring process.

--
Sebastien