[rkward-devel] check for debian packages

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mardi 17 avril 2012 à 10:20 +0200, Thomas Friedrichsmeier a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> On Sunday 15 April 2012, meik michalke wrote:
> > not sure if this could be implemented as a plugin, or if it would make more
> > sense to first come up with an R package for this (with an extended
> > install.packages() that also checks debian package archives?). i'm just
> > throwing this in here, maybe you have some comments ;-)
> 
> hm, good question.
> 
> I guess there are number of reasons for implementing this in an R package, 
> first, then extending RKWard to make use of that package, later. The best 
> reason is that quite conceivably the cran2deb / r-sig-debian people may be 
> interested in helping with creating and/or maintaining this.
> 
> One issue that comes to my mind is access rights. While install.packages() 
> will install to a local library by default, for debian packages you'd need 
> admin rights. To make this a smooth user experience, it should be possible to 
> acquire admin rights, interactively. Here it would be important for us to have 
> a parameter to specify a graphical, rather than console based su-command (i.e. 
> kdesu / kdesudo instead of su / sudo).
I think you can easily avoid this by using PackageKit instead of a
custom hack^W implementation. You would just need to give PK the package
name over D-Bus, and it would take care of everything, including
PolicyKit authentication via the dialogs adapted to the current desktop
environment.

The package would probably need to have a C function linking to libdbus
or any D-Bus implementation, but this is not a problem on Debian. The
D-Bus message to send is very simple[1].

The other big win is that your package would work on all Linux
distributions, and for BSDs, as long as the package names are the same
(or can be adapted at runtime, which should be easy).


My two cents


1: http://www.packagekit.org/pk-faq.html#session-methods