On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 6:13 AM, Dan Bolser <dan.bolser(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2008/9/2 Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa(a)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(a)chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia