[gentoo-soc] Automatically generated overlay of R packages - progress report #11

[gentoo-soc] Automatically generated overlay of R packages - progress report #11

[André Erdmann]

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.


== Last week's progress ==

* Added functionality to get packages via http, either by reading a
local file with package uris or by parsing a remote's PACKAGES file
This allows to use repos that don't offer rsync access as well as to
include single packages (without downloading them manually).

* ebuilds now report missing optional deps during pkg_postinst

* misc changes based on test results (like dependency rules, removing
"from http://...." text from dependency strings)

* an live ebuild (and a setup.py script for the python modules)


== Plans for this week ==

* write documentation

-- 
Regards,
André E.