[R-pkg-team] Bug#1054323: r-cran-tmb: autopkgtest needs update for new version of rmatrix: Package version inconsistency detected

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Graham,

Am Sun, Oct 29, 2023 at 10:12:56AM -0100 schrieb Graham Inggs:
> I found that in debian/control, r-cran-tmb has Depends:
> r-cran-matrix (>= 1.5-3-1~), but this is somehow replaced in the
> binary package, presumably by dh-r?

dh-r creates a variable R:Depends
 
> Andreas, would it be possible for dh-r to always replace the version
> in r-cran-tmb's Depends with r-cran-matrix (>= [the version of
> r-cran-matrix it was built with]) ?

Well, the *version* was correct even in r-cran-tmb 1.9.6-4.  However,
due to the '-' in the GNU R Matrix version the dpkg sorting mechanism
failed and we need the correct revision of the Debian package.  To
approach this I decided against hacking this exception into dh-r but
rather added override_dh_gencontrol to d/rules where I'm editing the
variable accordingly to have the r-cran-matrix Debian package revision
that was used at build time.

> Then you can avoid modifying Build-Depends and upstream's DESCRIPTION,
> and will allow r-cran-tmb to be binNMU'd when needed.  It should also
> allow for easier backporting.

I hope this will also work for backporting but with the current
dependency of TMB it also needs Matrix from testing.


There is probably one remaining problem.  As per file R/zzz.R[2] the
function checkMatrixPackageVersion verifies that TMB is running always
with the Matrix version it was built against.  Do you see some automatic
method to approach this which is better than simply waiting for a CI
test to fail (which should happen once a r-cran-matrix package of a new
Matrix version is uploaded)?

Kind regards
    Andreas.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/r-pkg-team/r-cran-tmb/-/blob/master/debian/rules#L10-13
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/r-pkg-team/r-cran-tmb/-/blob/master/R/zzz.R

-- 
http://fam-tille.de