[pkg-bioc] debian/ simplifications

[Steffen Moeller]

On Saturday 21 April 2007 20:07:53 David Vernazobres wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 09:47:38AM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote :
> > I made another change to r-cran.mk, and so far all packages 'just work'
> > by only source r-cran.mk.   The newest one was to have r-cran.mk grep for
> > 'Priority: recommended' in the DESCRIPTION file and then switch to
> > installing into /usr/lib/R/library/ (where reommeneded packages go)
> > rather than /usr/lib/R/site-library/
> >
> > Are there other modifications we could or should address from r-cran.mk?
> > The 'repositories' idea is also implemeneted.  A few month ago I added
> > inclusin of debian/overrides for Lintian, if found.
>
> cool,..
Yip!

Something I cannot stop thinking about since  had to remove some cran/bioc 
because of some disk space problems emerging: Could we get the LaTeX bits 
separated and possibly some other bits implemented in order to reduce the 
minimally required resources a bit?

> > Also, I no longer include the basically empty postinst/postrm.
> >
> > Lastly, one thing I find confusing when building the few dozen r-cran-*
> > packages I manually maintain:  Sometimes an R  package is NOT listed in
> > Depends: yet required under pbuilder (probably due to LazyLoad or
> > something).
>
> well, in cran2deb I am still adding dependencies from time to time
> manually. It's not a long term solution, but a solution.

We should strive for a close link to the upstream developers / bioc organisers 
to feed our manually determined dependencies back into their descriptions. We 
could e.g. publish our list ... hm ... we have it in a database now, don't 
we? I could come up with a script to do that.

> > How reliable is the Depends/Suggests information in DESCRIPTION
> > for us?
>
> Well, very low I will say. But some packages' descriptions are very good.
> So, it's a starting point.

I presume that upstream developers just never built their bits from scratch 
and are even plain unaware of their package's dependencies when writing the 
descriptions. I think that our work and the fixing of the dependencies is 
some kind of contribution to upstream, too. We just need to redefine our work 
a bit :-)

Cheers,

Steffen


-- 

Dr. Steffen Möller
University of Lübeck
Institute for Neuro- and Bioinformatics
Ratzeburger Allee 160
23538 Lübeck
Germany
T: +49 451 500 5504
F: +49 451 500 5502
moeller at inb.uni-luebeck.de
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bioc-devel/attachments/20070422/6ac84ac0/attachment.pgp