Comments from ftpmaster regarding spdep Debian package

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Roger,

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 09:36:22PM +0200, Roger Bivand wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
> 
> This isn't a patch to my spdep/inst/README file.

No, it's not! :-)

> I have no knowledge
> of any debian/copyright file, and cannot take responsibility for
> that

This was never intended - it was just for our ftpmasters because its
their responsibility to verify the copyright + license of each file we
want to upload.  Sorry if this was confusing.

> (I don't think installing from source is a problem for
> non-OSX/Windows users; I do not use Debian systems, and do not know
> anything about their packaging systems other than very bad
> experiences with people with messed up GIS packages). If you want me
> to patch anything, diff from spdep/inst/README on R-forge. In
> particular:
> 
>  Copyright: 2005 Yongwan Chun, Michael Tiefelsdorf and Roger Bivand
>  License: GPL-2+
> 
> looks very wrong.

Well, the line above this was

  Files: R/SpatialFiltering.R

in front of the Copyright/License paragraph.  We need to list all
explicite Copyright statement inside the code.  I can not see in how far
this should be in conflict with your spdep/DESCRIPTION file.

> The list of contributors is in spdep/DESCRIPTION
> in R standard parsable form;
> 
> +Files: R/bptest.sarlm.R
> +Copyright: 1998 Joseph O'Rourke <orourke at cs.smith.edu>
> 
> isn't the correct file - should be src/soigraph.c.

Uhhmmm, perhaps I misinterpretet your first answer.  We have to
troublesome files.  Would you please consider reading the original mail
here:

   http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-science-maintainers/2014-July/026470.html
 
> I'd be grateful if you'd run any (unneeded) copyright file by me
> before proceeding.

I hope not to do any unneeded work.  The Debian copyright file is
required for any Debian package and you can have a look here:

   http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/debian-science/packages/R/r-cran-spdep/trunk/debian/copyright?view=markup

I'd be more than happy if you could clarify the open issues for the
two files

   src/soigraph.c
   R/bptest.sarlm.R

in a format like this.

> If such a file is needed, it should only point to
> the correct file within the R package (otherwise they will get out
> of sync).

Since we are packaging more than R packages in Debian we can not drop
this general requirement and we need to stick to the given format.  I
agree that keeping these files in sync is a bit troublesome but I have
no choice but providing such a file (which works for >500 R packages
in Debian).
 
> As you can see, the "decision" of a "master" is of very little use

s/master/ftpmaster/ = the gate keeper of the Debian package pool.

> to me, I'll humour your attempts if you do things right, but have no
> need to see spdep distributed in this way - Debian users should IMO
> always install R packages from source to avoid unintended
> incompatibilities.

The rationale why I intend to package spdep is that we have a certain
set of R packages packaged for Debian for very good reasons and now it
turned out that spdep is used as a new dependency to run a test suite of
some other packages.  To make sure we will not have any
incompatibilities we really want to run the test suite - thus I need to
provide a spdep Debian package.  I'm aware that there are people who
consider Debian packages of R packages useless but as you probably also
know there are varying opinions about this and I'm just doing it as
a service request of some users (and not because I have no better clue
how to spend my spare time ;-)).

> Best wishes,

Same to you and sorry for the confusion I might have created

       Andreas.

-- 
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