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

[Thomas Weber]

Hi Dirk, 

Am Donnerstag, den 31.08.2006, 11:25 -0500 schrieb Dirk Eddelbuettel:
> Well, we came from the other end:  Essentially all existing CRAN package use
> the same debian/* files, so we figured we may as well automate that.

How do you get the Depends: and Build-Depends: lines in debian/control?
Is this done manually? 
Or do you get them from the Suggests: line in the add-on package's
DESCRIPTION file?

(For non-Debian maintainers: these line controls which packages must be
installed together with the current package on an end-user system or to
be able to build it, respectively).

Is an R add-on package allowed to depend on other add-on packages (that
is, how strong is the Suggests: in its DESCRIPTION file)?

> where the key is that all Debian needs to do is to call R CMD INSTALL with
> one argument for the install-directory redirection.  The rest is handled by
> Debian's cdbs package that aids with all the base rules.

I just had a look at INSTALL.in in r-base's src/scripts/ directory.
This doesn't look simple ...

	Thomas