[Fedora-r-devel-list] useR! 2008 status report

[Pierre-Yves]

José Matos wrote:
> Hi all,
> 	after a busy week I am finally starting to get back to some kind of normality 
> (no pun intended :-) ).
> 
> At useR! 2008 I had Martin Plummer, Marc Schwartz and Peter Dalgaard in the 
> audience. The talk went well and it was a fun to do. The room was small for 
> the attendance and in my (biased) view it seemed that I had people coming on 
> purpose for the talk. :-)
> 
> 	After the session ended I had a friendly discussion with Martin and Marc 
> regarding Fedora and R relationship. :-)
> 
> 	Some of the topics covered were (in no particular order other than my notes).
> 
> 1) The redundancy between the two mailing lists devoted to R and Fedora (this 
> and SIG list). Actually at that time I forgot the SIG mailing list (my bad). I 
> always keep forgetting about the different purpose of both lists.

/me notes to subscribe to this list...

> 2) Martin and Marc suggested one scenario that involved the removal of all R 
> packages from Fedora where the only remaining installed package would be the R 
> core package. Then using some kind of package, the better analogy that I found 
> was a backend to PackageKit providing automatic installs from CRAN.
> 
> My opinion (that I have also expressed back then) was that this would be a no 
> go for Fedora for two reasons, first the packages dependency outside of CRAN 
> would be hard to get right (think about packages like R-hdf5 that require 
> linking with an external package).

I have a couple of other example with the same issue, it is definitely 
something against such principle.

> The second and probably the most important 
> issue from our (Fedora) point of view would be the liability issue. We would 
> be connecting to a repository that we have no control about, I tried to 
> express the different reasons why this is not possible.

I (as packager) have also faced problem concerning the quality of some 
packages (pages not in UTF8, files put in the wrong part of the FS...). 
RPMs avoid these problems and make sure that the FS is kept clear.

Do you know if there is a place where such cross distro issues are/could 
be discussed ?

<snip/>
> 4) Is there a link in fedora bugzilla to connect upstream for R bugs reported 
> to Fedora? I am not sure if this is possible with the new bugzilla but I 
> suppose that there are not so many bugs like that reported at Fedora.

Spot, do you have many bugs reported against R ?
> 
> 5) One problem usually reported in the R users mailing list is the 
> installation procedure used to install R packages (not in Fedora) using the R 
> interface.
> 
> This problem has been reported again this weekend FWIW. Instead of providing 
> R-devel in the R package as Martin and Marc have suggested I think that we 
> could create a FAQ for R in Fedora. Something like:
> 
> *********************** Draft to R - Fedora FAQ **************************
> 
> Q: I tried to install the following R package in Fedora but R failed with 
> horrendous error messages, what should I do?
> 
> A: Look to the content of the R package you are trying to install (link to 
> CRAN).
> 
>   1) Does it contains C or C++ files (.c or .cpp ending filenames)? If yes 
> then install R-devel if it is not yet installed.
> 
> [Instructions how to install R-devel using yum or packagekit]
> 
>   2) Does it contains Fortran files (.f or .F ending filenames)? If yes then 
> install gcc-gfortran if it is not yet installed.
> 
> [Instructions how to install R-devel using yum or packagekit]

If the solution proposed by spot does not work (or before it works)
I think a simple:
find ./source/ -name "*.py" -o -name "*.c" -o -name "*.cp"  -o -name 
"*.f"  -o -name "*.F"
If it returns something then install the -devel...

>   3) If the steps above are not enough and the package depends on an external 
> library you need to guarantee that you have installed the files necessary to 
> compile the package. Do not forget that the -devel subpackages are required to 
> be installed to compile and link with the external libraries.
> 

I went briefly through your presentation, nice :)
I hope you had good time there.

Regards,
Pierre