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Hi Sebastien, |
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|
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Please forgive me for my lack of knowledge about package managers, but |
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what systems are in place to generate ebuilds on the fly? And is there |
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any compatibility between the different package managers in that |
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sense? Would it be possible to make an overlay build a repository of R |
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packages on the fly? If ebuilds are generated on the fly, how will we |
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deal with nontrivial ebuilds? |
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|
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As always, there are a number of advantages to make the package |
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manager do the hard work. I guess some more benefits would, among |
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many, be: emerge world updates R packages too (ie. centralized |
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updating), packages in portage can pull in R packages without user |
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interference, and users can relatively easily install R packages with |
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patches. |
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|
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Thanks, |
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Auke. |
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|
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2010/3/19 Sébastien Fabbro <bicatali@g.o>: |
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> On Thursday 18 March, Auke Booij wrote: |
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> |
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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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> |
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> Hi, |
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> |
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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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> |
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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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> -- |
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> Sebastien |
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> |
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> |
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