Bug#897262: dh-r problem with higher-priority R packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Package: dh-r
Severity: important

As discussed on the debian-r list in this message
   https://lists.debian.org/debian-r/2018/04/msg00062.html
for R packages with (upstream) 'Priority: recommended' (as in all the package
our virtual package r-recommended depends upon), the ${R:Depends} and other
variables are not expanded.

I suspect this has to do with the fact that per an old tradition, these
packages install into
  /usr/lib/R/library/
whereas all others install into
  /usr/lib/R/site-library/
so I suspect a path may not be read correctly.

To reproduce, take a package such as cluster from
  https://salsa.debian.org/edd/r-cran-lattice
and revert the last commit, or change by hand back the manually added
R version and API on this line
  https://salsa.debian.org/edd/r-cran-lattice/blob/master/debian/control#L13
to the previous value of
  Depends: ${R:Depends}, ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
and note how this resulting package has no R dependency and no r-api-*
tag. That is the bug.

The old cdbs-based system had no issues, so I do not think that this is
caused by the underlying debhelper commands.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org