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declaring package dependencies

9 messages · Matt Dowle, Ben Bolker, Yihui Xie +4 more

Original
Matt Dowle
# 
I'm a little surprised by this thread.

I subscribe to the RSS feeds of changes to NEWS (as Dirk mentioned) and 
that's been pretty informative in the past :
http://developer.r-project.org/RSSfeeds.html

Mainly though, I submit to winbuilder before submitting to CRAN, as the 
CRAN policies advise.  winbuilder's R-devel seems to be built daily, 
saving me the time. Since I don't have Windows it kills two birds with 
one stone.  It has caught many problems for me before submitting to CRAN 
and I can't remember it ever not responding in a reasonable time.
http://win-builder.r-project.org/upload.aspx

I've suggested before that winbuilder could be the mechanism to submit 
to CRAN rather than an ftp upload to incoming.  Only if winbuilder 
passed OK on R-devel could it then go to a human.   But iirc there was a 
technical difficulty preventing this.

Matthew
Ben Bolker
# 
Matthew Dowle <mdowle <at> mdowle.plus.com> writes:
I was planning to write a careful e-mail to CRAN suggesting
essentially this, and I may yet do so, but for now I'll just chime in
and "+1" this.  Yihui Xie made a very similar suggestion sometime
last year (I think).  It would seem so much easier for everyone,
package maintainers *and* CRAN maintainers, to have an automatic
filter of this sort, and I can't figure out any downside other than
needing slightly more computer power (which surely must be a reasonable
tradeoff for fewer human resources!), *if* having the
auto-filter made people sloppier about checking before submitting.
   Do you happen to remember what the technical difficulty was?
If I were a CRAN maintainer (thank goodness I'm not!), overcoming
it would be one of my top priorities ...

  Ben Bolker
Yihui Xie
# 
I've been watching this thread closely and trying not to chime in,
because as Brian Rowe mentioned about CRAN's mysterious absence in a
previous reply. CRAN is like a ghost in r-devel (or any other mailing
lists) -- everybody is discussing about it, and nobody has ever seen
it. Perhaps one day useRs will realize that the rings of Saturn are
actually composed of the lost discussions about CRAN. (Just kidding.
No offence. I swear I appreciate the great work of CRAN, and
rep("thank you, CRAN", 1e6).)

Although this discussion may also contribute to the rings of Saturn, I
want to emphasize one final point: requests from package authors do
not necessarily mean more work for CRAN.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA
On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 6:11 PM, Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com> wrote:
Brian Lee Yung Rowe
# 
That reminds me: I once made a suggestion on how to automate some of the CRAN deployment process, but it was shot down as not being useful to them. I do recall a quote that was along the lines of "as long as you don't need help, do whatever you want", so one thought is to just set up a build server that does the building across the three versions of R, checks dependencies, rebuilds when release, patch, or devel are updated, etc. This would ease the burden on package maintainers and would just happen to make the CRAN folks' lives easier by catching a lot of bad builds. A proof of concept on AWS connecting to github or rforge could probably be finished on a six-pack. Speak up if anyone thinks this would be useful.
On Sep 15, 2013, at 9:58 PM, Yihui Xie <xie at yihui.name> wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Göran Broström
    

    

      
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On 09/15/2013 11:09 AM, Matthew Dowle wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Right, but

"Please _do not_ upload BioConductor packages or CRAN packages."

from the winbuilder page.

G?ran

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Duncan Murdoch
    

    

      
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On 13-09-16 3:59 AM, G?ran Brostr?m wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
From the context, that message is about packages that are already on 
CRAN without Windows binaries already built.

Duncan Murdoch

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Duncan Murdoch
    

    

      
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On 13-09-15 9:58 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
It's no mystery that they don't discuss CRAN policies on this list. 
That's been stated many times.  I don't expect that to change because 
users on this list make stupid jokes about it.

Duncan Murdoch

CRAN is like a ghost in r-devel (or any other mailing

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Göran Broström
    

    

      
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On 09/16/2013 12:38 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Maybe, but that is not what the page says.

Anyway, may I use this facility to check new versions of my CRAN 
packages or not?

G?ran

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Uwe Ligges
    

    

      
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On 16.09.2013 13:52, G?ran Brostr?m wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Yes, before submission, but not if the version is on CRAN already (i.e. 
if the version became a CRAN package).

Best,
Uwe Ligges