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

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

I did not intended to answer a flamish mail but I have noticed that for
whatever reason Dirk's mail did not made it to the list where it belongs
to.  To make sure we will not hide negative voices against our work
(well, the attack was basically personally - but I regard Debian Med as
a team project) I'm reposting it below.

For the record: Between the mail below and now I was busy fixing
reported bugs
  #748347: which is a Debian Science bug but is on topic to the mail
           below and a predependency for Debian Med package
           r-cran-surveillance
  #748235: which is pkg-java but a precondition for a BioLinux package
  #748637
  #748155
as well as working on a test suite for python-cogent which has turned
out to be a complex task.  If anybody in the team thinks Dirk is right
and it serves our users better to work on updating CRAN packages
everybody is welcome to prepare updates in VCS and I'll be happy to
sponsor this work.  I'd also be happy to guide any interested person in
the MoM project to learn the technical skills that are needed to do
this.

It might also be a good idea to check in how far we could enhance our
documentation to point to debian-r.debian.net - any volunteer to do
this?

Kind regards

        Andreas.

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 06:34:03AM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> On 15 May 2014 at 10:15, Andreas Tille wrote:
> | simple.  I agree that the pure fact Dirk is stating is true:  Yes, we
> | are lagging behind upstream.
> 
> And you make that a "policy". I don't think that flies. Remember this line:
> 
>         "Our priorities are our users"
> 
> | My point is that we are delivering Debian stable *releases* to
> 
> You just singlehandedly redefined Debian as not caring about current packages
> in unstable / testing.  
> 
> I have been here almost 19 years, and I have met many maintainers.  Not one
> shares the view that we should rot packages and only update for stable.
> 
> That is just plain nonsense.
> 
> | fine for me but I'm bored to discuss this over and over.
> 
> Me too as you will never change your mind.
> 
> 
> FWIW to install (or update) R package I use two five-liner R scripts
> (included as examples in my 'littler' package) as I would much rather have
> __current__ packages in /usr/local/ than your bitrot in /usr.  And then there
> is Don Armstrong's marvelous debian-r.debian.net which renders all this moot.
> 
> This is really really sad and upsetting as I have poured a decade into making
> R good on Debian, and maintain a hundred __current and bugfree__ packages. If
> I may add, I do run into people thanking me for making R on Debian
> awesome. To have you sabotage this with planned bitrot is just sad.
> 
> But maybe I will write some posts over on the R side explaining to people
> they should just avoid and ignore your packages. Which is a win for you too
> as you'll never get the bug reports asking for an update.  
> 
> Don't bother following up.
> 
> Dirk
> 
> -- 
> Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com
> 

-- 
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