[Fedora-r-devel-list] R2spec new release

[George N. White III]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 6:13 AM, Dan Bolser <dan.bolser at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2008/9/2 Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com>:
>> On Sun, 2008-08-31 at 18:12 +0100, Dan Bolser wrote:
>>
>>> Now is there any way to cross check these against what R actually has
>>> installed? I am trying to think about ways that the R-installer could
>>> be used in combination with the packages... or is the idea to package
>>> the whole of CRAN? Where would such a repo be maintained? How would it
>>> be kept in sync with CRAN?
>>
>> Well, I'm certainly not so bored as to want to repackage all of CRAN. :)
>>
>> I think the safest thing is to query R for what it has installed, and
>> not be concerned about whether it was built manually from CRAN, or
>> provided pre-built by Fedora.

In researching the possibility of having userland rpm, there was a
suggestion that
dummy packages be created for the base system rpms, so that dependencies will
be resolved against the system versions.   This raises the possibility of a
tool to create dummy rpm's for packages installed by R.   That way, rather than
the user having to check dependencies across 2 different package management
systems, there could a command to create dummy rpms for manually built CRAN
packages.  These could be "installed" so they would be used by rpm to resolve
dependencies in pre-built Fedora rpms.

> OK, and then packages from Fedora with deps in CRAN that have been
> locally built can be installed right? Can we set up the RPM so that it
> can 'query R for what it has installed' for the purposes of resolving
> such deps?
>
> Is this what happens already?

With R, users can manually install CRAN package from source to
$HOME/R/library...
I doubt that can be handled using the system rpm database -- you would need a
database owned by each user.  Since some sites are moving to a model that
separates user applications from the base system, there is a need for packaging
that does not require root access simply to maintain the rpm database.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia