[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#702882: Status of igraph packaging for Debian

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Tamás,

I realised that there remains an open bug to version 0.6.5.  Could you
please check whether this exists or not.  Mathieu, what do you think?

Kind regards

        Andreas.

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 12:09:51PM +0200, Tamás Nepusz wrote:
> 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
> 

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