[gentoo-soc] Automatically generated overlay of R packages - progress report #5

[gentoo-soc] Automatically generated overlay of R packages - progress report #5

[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.

== Progress of this week ==

I've written a "many R packages -> Overlay" interface (OverlayCreator)
which accepts R packages and organizes them in a queue. It also
spawns/runs OverlayWorkers that try to create an ebuild for each
package they get from the queue. Running several workers in parallel
is possible. Successfully processed packages are then inserted into a
portage tree-like structure that handles metadata creation and overlay
writing to a directory, including ebuild/metadata.xml/Manifest files
as well as the profiles dir (repo_name, categories, use.desc).
All in all, creating an overlay for R packages is possible now.


I'm on schedule.


== Plans for the next week ==

I'll concentrate on remote syncing (CRAN, ...) 'cause I need them for
testing soon (July) and it'll take some time to get the packages.

-- 
Regards,
André E.