From rowe at muxspace.com  Mon Sep 16 04:46:32 2013
From: rowe at muxspace.com (Brian Rowe)
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 22:46:32 -0400
Subject: [Rd] declaring package dependencies
In-Reply-To: <CANROs4e8=v5S-FAWmKJ4C2aQMp35dqnmyUp_1=8QisU=+iWYdg@mail.gmail.com>
References: <5235795C.3050903@mdowle.plus.com>
	<loom.20130916T010538-629@post.gmane.org>
	<CANROs4e8=v5S-FAWmKJ4C2aQMp35dqnmyUp_1=8QisU=+iWYdg@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <0671A35F-D263-48F2-B08D-1BC011E2E2FE@muxspace.com>

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:

> 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:
>> Matthew Dowle <mdowle <at> mdowle.plus.com> writes:
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 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
>> 
>>  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
> 
> ______________________________________________
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> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel



[Rd] declaring package dependencies
Brian Rowe