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

[Auke Booij]

Hey there,

Google Summer of Code is slowly taking off, I'd like to claim a spot.

Two ideas I'd like to expand on behalf of Gentoo are:
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?

2. Per-user daemons. Currently, there are some daemons, like
PulseAudio, jackd, several download daemons, and soon possibly X.org
(which will no longer need to run as root, and really should run as a
normal user), which run as specific users, instead of root or a
systemwide daemon-specific user. There is currently no framework for
launching these daemons at all, and the current solution is to either
make users figure out their own solution (a popular one is an extra
line in .xinitrc), or to set the username in some conf.d file, thus
disabling the possibility to run several of them for different users.
I would like to develop an extension to our current init.d system
which will enable users to write and start their own init scripts,
which at first only run as themselves, not as another user. This would
make it possible to cleanly launch several identical daemons for
several users. This project would involve either writing a new
additional init.d system, or extend our current system. I would like
to know 1. if you guys are understanding a word of what I'm saying at
all 2. if this would be an interesting idea (I think it is, of course)
3. anyone has any ideas or would like to mentor me.

Thanks for your ideas.
Auke Booij "tulcod".