[pkg-bioc] Option to build only one or some packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 6 February 2006 at 21:40, Gregor Gorjanc wrote:
| Is there any option in cran2deb.pl to build only one or some packages.
| It would be nice not to "fiddle" with all packages at once. For now I
| have dowloaded the whole CRAN stuff and then moved all unwanted source
| tarballs and then runned the script. It builded only packages whos
| sources were available. I know that pactches to script are welcome, but
| perl is unfortunatelly not mine good point.

Well -- Code contributions would be welcome! It doesn't have to be Perl -- it
just happens to be Perl as this goes back a few authors and maintainers [1].

I quite like what package.skeleton() does inside R (to aide in creating R
packages). We could write a basic generator for files in debian/ using R
instead of Perl and would end up with an R-based solution for something like
the debhelper scripts.

That would some advantages. For example, we'd get one canonical and current
place for the debian/{rules, postinst, control, ...} snippet.  Such an R
package could even live on CRAN, or maybe rather inside Debian, or both ...

What we may need to do, though, is to update the 'Policy' document first to
encode all the different things the code needs to know:
-- use /usr/lib/R/library/ for packages in r-recommended
-- use /usr/lib/R/sitelibrary/ for all others
-- Architecture: any for packages with src/ directories
-- Architecture: all for all others packages
-- Various 'mappings' between CRAN and Debian package names
-- Meta-knowledhe about Depends: and things that can't/won't build on Linux
and so on.

If anybody is interested in carrying that torch...

Cheers, Dirk 

[1] For the morbidly curious: all members of pkg-bioc on Alioth, before that
Dirk who adopted it from Detlef Steuer who took it from Albrecht Gebhardt who
wrote the first iteration to build SuSE rpms (!!)


-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison