[R-pkg-team] Bug#1089197: dh-r: Stop generating Depends/Suggests/Recommends from the apt cache

[Philip Rinn]

On 19.12.24 at 12:34, Philip Rinn wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
> 
> On 19.12.24 at 11:49, Andreas Tille wrote:
>>> The main idea is to have a mapping table embedded in dh-r which can be
>>> overrode on package level.
>>>
>>> mapping table would basically be
>>>
>>> <R package name> <corresponding Debian package name>
>>> knitr r-cran-knir
>>> ggplot2 r-cran-ggplot2
>>> reshape2 r-cran-reshape2
>>> ...
>>>
>>> containing a mapping for all packages in Debian unstable at the time 
>>> of the
>>> dh-r upload.
>>>
>>> This would of course mean that we'd need to keep that list moderately
>>> updated in the dh-r package.
>>
>> Well, in principle the package *names* can be calculated more or less -
>> we only need to know whether these are CRAN or BioConductor (or other)
>> packages.  However, maintaining dh-r after de facto every new r-*
>> package is a burden I would love to avoid.
> 
> The more I think about it, I guess we should actually _not_ have a list 
> in dh-r but generate the Depends/Suggests/Recommends at the time of 
> creating the _source_ package. So I'd suggest to have what I called 
> 'package level override' in my first mail (but filling d/control 
> directly). [See the package example below for context of why.]
> 
> We'd probably need that list in dh-r for a migration period though.

Ah, this is probably nonsense. We could have a mapping in dh-r plus the 
package specific amends/overrides and still not run into problems like I 
described in my reply.

So to answer your initial remark: As we have package amends/overrides we 
don't need a dh-r upload per new r-* package.
The important property we need to have is that there is a stable (in the 
sense of fixed by the version of dh-r and the Debian package version) 
mapping from R packages to Debian packages.

Best
Philip
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