R/CRAN/BioC Packaging Improvements and Extensions
Mentor: DirkEddelbuettel
Summary: Improve and extend the existing code for automated Debian package builds of R packages from CRAN and BioC
Required skills:
- Perl is currently being used, along with R and SQL
- other languages cold be brought in
- some familiarity with R and its package system is needed
Description: The GNU R language and system has a very successful internal package format. An existing Alioth project has made excellent recent progress and currently builds 600+ packages from CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network) and 1100+ packages from BioConductor (a bioinformatics/genomics project built on top of R). However, the code can always do with some refactoring. There are currently two main developers pushing the code (Steffen and David, see the CVS logs) and they as well as Dirk have ideas about where to take it from here. Possible examples are improved CRAN / BioC mirroring with database logging, on-demand incremental builds, or even a GUI or web interface showing meta information about new packages, new builds, package changelogs, timelines, ... to inform users about new source packages and needed and/or available Debian packages.