[gentoo-soc] Automatically generated overlay of R packages - progress report #8

["André Erdmann" <dywi@mailerd.de>]

Hi everyone,

== Brief summary of this project ==

The aim of this project is to create scripts that automate the process
of overlay creation/maintenance for R packages from repositories such
as CRAN and Bioconductor.

Longer:
For the ebuild creation of a single package one needs to extract the
package, copy-paste data from its description file to the ebuild and
look up dependencies, which is time-consuming.
Although trivial for a few number of packages, this is practically
impossible to do by hand for repositories like CRAN (> 3500 packages),
especially 'cause it also requires tracking changes (new / updated /
removed packages).
The solution is to automate that process and this is what this project is about.

== Progress of this week ==

I'm on schedule:
* wrote some documentation (man pages for the main script and
repo/dependency rule files)
* added "dependency types" to the resolver, it can now distinguish
between internal (other R packages) and external deps (with some
variations like "optional R package" - create ebuild even if dep
cannot be resolved)

== Plans for the next week ==

* redefine the timeline for the rest of the project
* start with incremental overlay writing

-- 
Regards,
André E.