[pkg-bioc] i386 builds of CRAN

[Steffen Moeller]

Hi all,

many thanks to Dirk for forwarding my initial work on i386 CRAN and its 
positive reception. I did not do much, I must admit, I just ran the 
existing code, so all the applause should reflect to the ones 
responsible for that. Actually I found Egon's Wiki pages very helpful 
and did some editing to these, please check it out at 
http://wiki.debian.net/?AliothPkgBioc. If somebody knew how to tell 
alioth to make the Wiki pages our project's home, then I would very much 
appreciate it. You also find something like a summary of your past 
emails there with the troublemaking packages.

If I perceive this right, then we are now running into problems because 
of novel-built packages being in conflict with existing R packages. I 
think we should refrain from changing the script but rather change the 
Debian packages whenever possible. E.g., should not r-cran-gregmisc 
depend on the gtool, gdata and all the other greg packages instread? 
There are dependencies on gdata which otherwise could not be resolved. I 
think we make ourselves unhappier in the long end for any articificial 
barrier between the upstream repository and the one of Debian.

Something else I thought of is

* mailing all the upstream authors to improve on the description of 
their packages to get titles and descriptions nicer
* to come up with a semiautomatic schema to get this done within the 
script, analogous to the changelogs.

As I said before, I rather make upstream better than the Debian 
packages. Though, for my BioConductor packages I already invested quite 
some efforts into a separation of dependencies and build-dependencies, 
recommends, retrieval of email addresses etc that I would not like 
losing too much. How would you think about implementing an optional 
control and copyright file for every package, falling back to the 
template if not existing? Should not the changelogs become part of our 
repository on Alioth?

Many greetings

Steffen