[Pkg-octave-devel] Re: Automatic generation of Debian packages from CRAN

[John W. Eaton]

On 31-Aug-2006, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

| Dirk and John,
| 
| Could you please move this discussion to pkg-octave-devel?  I think that the
| other developers may be interested by the issues you are discussing.  If the
| both of you doesn't disagree, I will bounce Dirk's message to the list.

That's fine with me.  Please go ahead and forward my original message
to the list.  I've appended it below

jwe

Subject: Automatic generation of Debian packages from CRAN
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo.che.wisc.edu>
To: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>
cc: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:50:55 -0400
Message-ID: <17655.1375.719956.912610 at segfault.lan>

Hi,

We are (finally) working on a package system for Octave and splitting
up Octave Forge into individual packages.

Some people are proposing to make it easy to bundle a lot of Octave
packages together to make it easier for the the deb/rpm packagers to
create packages.

Instead of that, I want to encourage the people working on Octave's
package system to make it possible (and easy) to generate individual
deb or rpm packages from the corresponding Octave packages, becuase
I'm imagining that I would eventually like to be able to do something
like

  apt-get install octave
  apt-get install octave-pkg-audio
  apt-get install octave-pkg-image
  apt-get install octave-pkg-optimization

etc. to pick and choose individual packages in Debian and not also get
everything that used to be in Octave Forge.

I think you are doing something similar for R and all the CRAN
packages.  If you have time, would you mind commenting on what
features are needed in the R package system to make the automatic
generation of deb packages manageable?  Or, if this is documented
somewhere, can you tell me where to look?

Thanks,

jwe