[rkward-devel] R backports on launchpad

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hello Vincent,

Vincent Goulet schrieb:
> Please also consider that I build these R packages solely as a service to the community. I no longer use Ubuntu myself on any of my computers (Macs for desktop, Debian stable for servers)! I took quite some time to write build scripts to automate most of the process and I'm getting ever more resistant to change as time goes by. You may find my scripts useful, though; see https://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/svn/R/cran-ubuntu/.

I can absolutely see your point, and I won't insist, but before I give 
up, I will try to convince you once more.

First, what we are looking for in RKWard, is building packages much more 
often than just for every stable release, ideally even daily. This is 
not only to make it easier for testers to follow the development, but 
also to discover build problems early on, instead of a few days before 
the targetted release date.

I really, really appreciate your work of providing backports of rkward. 
But now we want more, and I assume that's more than you'd be willing to 
provide for us. This is not beyond the scope of launchpad though, and 
basically, all we need to do is to feed it our sources in regular 
intervals. However, if we also want to use launchpad to compile against 
R backports (and we do want that), then these need to be hosted 
somewhere on launchpad.

The primary audience for your R-backports on launchpad would not be 
end-users. Rather this would allow developers to use launchpad PPAs for 
compiling their software against your backports - without maintaining 
installations of several different releases of Ubuntu on two different 
architectures.

Now, if needs be, we could just fetch your source-packages from CRAN, 
and feed them into a launchpad PPA, ourselves. However, keeping that in 
sync would mean a bunch of work that we would simply like to avoid.

Using a launchpad PPA would not only make *our* life a bit easier, but 
possibly it could also save *you* some work in the future. For instance, 
it might lower the barriers for somebody else to take over 
responsibility for the backports one day. In this context, note that 
launchpad also allows to set up a PPA for teams of people, not just 
individuals.

Well, I hope this is enough to change your mind, but if it's not, I can 
totally understand that as well.

Regards
Thomas