[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#617296: Any Progress with RStudio?

[Charles Plessy]

Le Thu, May 15, 2014 at 08:12:53AM +0200, Andreas Tille a écrit :
> On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 03:56:06PM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> > 
> > On 14 May 2014 at 22:43, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > | Why not commiting your work to Debian Science repository and let others
> > | have a look?  I'd be interested and might spent some time cycles into it.
> > 
> > Well if you have spare cycles, would you mind looking at the various r-cran-*
> > packages some of which are __several__ CRAN releases behind?
> > 
> > ...
> > A casual look at
> > http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian-med-packaging@lists.alioth.debian.org
> 
> I'm watching this page regularly and I'm pretty aware of this.  You
> remember that we do not share the same opinion about how important
> always up to date pages are?  We have good reasons to add packages and
> we try to do a sensible upgrade path for our target users.  Please
> accept that people have different preferences than you.

Hi all,

Part of the bitrot might be caused by the fact that on my side, I have stopped
working on R packages because the FTP team made quite clear that my
contribution was worth peanuts when it comes to decide who gets involved in
private discussions leading to project-wide decisions.  ("We did discuss this.
Not with you, but we did.")

The decision that I disagree with is the following:

  We shall consider these data files as preferred form of modification if the
  data was captured in this format from a scientific instrument, created manually
  and painstakingly by hand (this is not the common case), or otherwise not
  generated. If the data was generated, or converted by a script or series of
  scripts, the .Rda file is likely not the prefered form, and needs to be rebuilt
  at build-time from source (as we do with any binary in the archive).

One year and a half after this decision, how efficiently have we implemented
it in our already existing packages ?

I would be happy to restart giving of my free time to the R packages maintained
by the Debian Med and Debian Science teams, if the above rule is relaxed.  The main
problem with this rule is that it makes it too hard to introduce new packages.  And
new packages are sometime strictly necessary to upgrade existing packages (ggplot2
was a striking example for this).

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan