[pkg-bioc] My first steps with cran2deb.pl

[Egon Willighagen]

On Tuesday 27 December 2005 17:41, Frederic Lehobey wrote:
> 1/ I have noticed some of the packages in CRAN that are automagically
> built by the script are actually already in the official Debian
> archive.  What is the goal for them (ultimately)?  Having them built
> by the script or being blacklisted from it one way or another.  In
> other words, is it interesting to keep and track their status with
> respect to automatic build?

Agreeing with the others. What's manually packaged for Debian has preference.

> 2/ How am I supposed to deal with dependencies between newly built
> CRAN packages?  More precisely, if the necessary dependencies stated
> on http://wiki.debian.org/DebianCRAN are available in the build
> environment (from the Debian archive), then a huge list of CRAN
> packages can be built.  However, some of the failing ones (at first
> pass) simply need that some of the newly built packages be added to
> the build environment.  What it the proper way to do it?  Install them
> `by hand' with dpkg -i?

That's how I did it in the past. Not very handy, but works... if pbuilder 
addresses this in a better way, that's where we should be heading...

> 3/ Some failures are architecture dependent (mostly endianness
> problems for powerpc and sparc according to error messages).  How to
> deal with that?  Setup some exclusion mechanism similar to
> `cannotbuildamd64'?  (Then, there will be as many variables as
> architectures.)

Before I added the 'cannotbuildamd64' list, there was a 'cannotbuild' 
blacklist... which is for i386, I think... Using these lists, indeed as many 
as archs, but I see no problem there, allows building of as many package for 
as many architectures as possible...

The blacklists itself can be used by upstream to see on which archs their 
packages don't build. We should keep the 'excuses' list in the wiki [1] up to 
date, where we state the problem for which the package is black listed... 
maybe in a (semi-)automatic way... Again, to be used by upstream...

OK, so the architectures we have now are: i386, sparc, powerpc, kfreebsd-i386 
and amd64 (me). Any other architectures?

Did you only build for sid? I guess we should be building for sarge too, or 
maybe even mostly for sarge...

Egon

1.http://wiki.debian.org/DebianCRAN

-- 
e.willighagen at science.ru.nl
PhD student on Molecular Representation in Chemometrics
Radboud University Nijmegen
Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/
http://www.cac.science.ru.nl/people/egonw/
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