[Debian-med-packaging] Status of igraph packaging for Debian

[Tamás Nepusz]

Hi Andreas,

> OK, I have updated debian/watch file (please checkout svn[1]). I'd
> suggest to always use this for packaging issues and keep us (= the
> Debian Med team) informed about needed changes. The new version was
> just uploaded to unstable.
Thanks, looks great!

Also, I'm happy to maintain the offician debian/ dir of igraph at svn.debian.org in the future. I'll send a request to join the Debian-med team on Alioth soon. Also, I was wondering whether I should also maintain the debian/ dir of python-igraph, but it looks like that belongs to a different team so maybe it's better if I ask there.

> What I would be really wondering is the Role of R igraph. I realised
> that it contains a code copy of (c-)igraph which is somehow against
> Debian policy.
I'm not that familiar with R packaging (on our side it is Gabor who is responsible for developing and maintaining the R interface of igraph) but I have a vague recollection that he once said that R packages that depend on an external C library usually also contain a copy of the source code of that library and compile the whole thing (i.e. the dependent library and the actual glue code between R and the library) in one batch when someone runs "install.packages(...)" from R. This is probably the reason why the R interface of igraph also contains a copy of the C library. But again, I never created R packages so I might be wrong here and the best is probably ask someone who is more familiar with R packages to see how it is done in practice (as I'm pretty sure that igraph is not the only R package that depends on an external C library).

Best regards,
Tamas