On Jan 6, 2010, at 12:35 PM, Max Kuhn wrote:
My company is trying to manage R installations across a number large
SMP machines. We're thinking out the best way to manage the packages
installs and updates. They would be happy if we could work out RPM's
for package installations (traceable, easily facilitated with existing
sw management tools).
I don't know a lot and RPMs beyond how to use them, but it seems
plausible to write R code to create the RPM package. If we need to
update package X, which triggers and update of ancillary packages Y
and Z, it should be possible to use available.packages() to figure out
the dependencies, download the sources, write out the RPM headers and
package things up.
Before I try to write any code, does anyone see any issues with this
(or has it already been done)? Is this a ridiculous approach?
Thanks,
Max
Max,
It would certainly be beneficial for you or someone at your shop to
get intimately familiar with creating RPM packages for Fedora/RHEL if
that is the way you want to go. There are various detail issues
involved in creating RPMs and for R packages specifically.
The following page from the Fedora wiki would likely serve as a
starting point for creating and maintaining R related RPMs:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:R
The Fedora and RHEL/EPEL folks (basically the same people) are
providing standardized RPMs for selected CRAN packages and it would
make sense from a consistency perspective, not to mention not re-
inventing the wheel, to learn from their activity.
The R package managers involved in maintaining the R related RPMs have
their own e-mail list which you might find helpful, albeit the volume
there is low:
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-r-devel-list
and of course we have our own Fedora SIG:
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora
HTH,
Marc Schwartz
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
