Robin, Michael, Welcome. I guess this will be our first on-list message, now that Robin joined, replying to Robin's mail to us. I am not sure if Don and Gabor will join. I pinged them again earlier. | I'm a data scientist for UK government and I product manage an open source | analytics platform we are building. The platform is docker/k8s based, and | we use the rocker Dockerfiles to provide R to our analysts. | | I'm currently wondering about the feasibility of us hosting a publicly | CRAN-like 'package proxy' for Debian packages, to provide pre-built | packages that correspond specifically to the rocker Dockerfiles. I think | this idea may be either similar or the same thing as cran2deb. That is very clearly something cran2deb can do / could do / should do. In essence, most (almost all) of my Travis CI builds triggered off GitHub work that may. Travis uses an Ubuntu LTS build, and cran2deb at launchpad matches those. Sometimes I build my own packages and put those in my PPA to complement what Michael has. But his some 3000+ packages are a very comprehensive basis. But then that is Ubuntu, and rocker uses Debian. So rocker needs a second repo. Michael and I have been (very slowly) working away at a code update, and have a machine in the cloud as part of the small R Consortium project we have here. Just not that many packages (at all). But the underlying code is public: https://github.com/r-builder/cran2deb It's a bit of a funny repo as it goes back to the cran2deb from 10 years. | I wondered whether there is interested in collaborating on this? We have | a small team of developers and ops people who, whilst very good at what | they do, are not R experts. I don't understand cran2deb well enough to The current code is in R, so help from someone who knows R and package building would be ideal. Barring that, we may just have to teach someone. | say, but it's possible that this may just be a case of giving a bit of | R-specific advice to my technical team on how they can contribute to the | project/host some infrastructure. The most important thing is an actual need, and some resources. | Before committing to anything, I'd need to check I had support from | management. So at this stage, it'd be useful to just get an indication of | whether anyone has the time/willingness/an interest in helping. Or, | alternatively, if you know of anyone else who may do. Absolutely. Let's talk some more and make this happen. One aside, and as you mentioned what rstudio.cloud does: I had a look. In a vanilla rstudio.cloud instance, if I request installation of RcppArmadillo I guess Rcpp from a binary package (!!) and RcppArmadillo from source. So they seem to use a hybrid. The 'R CMD INSTALL ...' command actually has an option --binary which can create a quick-to-install binary. I think Gabor uses that scheme with R Hub too. It is quick, but I think it falls short of proper dependencies, has likely no pre/post install hooks and other things a proper package would have. My preference would still be to spend compilation time _once_ create a (binary) .deb from a CRAN source, and then amortise that time. You could take this shortcut, I just don't think it is industrial strength enough. Best, Dirk | | Best wishes, | | Robin | ----- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | On 14 April 2018 at 15:45, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@...> wrote: | | > | > Robin, | > | > That is *most interesting*. We should definitely talk. | > | > There are two more here on the project besides Michael and myself, but our | > mailing list just disappeared (and Debian moved/consolidated hosts open for | > 3rd party projects) and I'd rather have this 'on list'. So sit tight -- if | > everybody joins I continue there. | > | > Ok to forward this to a list that may be public? Nothing sensitive here, | > correct? | > | > Dirk | > | > -- | > http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd@... | > -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd@...