[gentoo-soc] G-CRAN weekly report #1

[gentoo-soc] G-CRAN weekly report #1

[Auke Booij]

My development started by examining the R package format, which
honestly is pretty straightforward. A lot of data can be retrieved
from a repository file called PACKAGES, and each package has its own
metadata files. I've read the paludis source code, and the C++ part
simply makes sense, but the true piece of gold is a file called
cran.bash, which will be a huge source of inspiration for the code
which will actually build and install CRAN/Bioconductor packages.

More importantly than all the above, I've found a few like-minded
(well, at least they're like-minded now) fellow Gentoo SOC students
(wiktor_b and iElectric) with whom I'll be creating a generic solution
for non-ebuild repositories. There's a fourth student doing a similar
project for Octave/Matlab packages (rafaelmartins), but he's already
started and would rather stick to his own schedule and will not be
cooperating with us, apart from an incidental sharing of thoughts.

While it's not entirely clear how package managers should support our
new system eventually, any package manager that doesn't support it is
given an ebuild which "forwards" actions to the right package format
"driver". This forwarding is regulated by the main system, called
g-common, and individual drivers can specify how to build packages
correctly. We've documented our approach in a wiki and the design we
eventually settled for is called "interface 1" (a previous design
called "interface 0" was quickly blown to smithereens by yours truly).

We've more or less agreed on an approach for this system and for now
we'll go on by individually writing the drivers, still meeting weekly
but only continuing development on g-common in about 3 weeks.