Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2018 21:57:21 +0100 From: Rainer Hurling <rhurlin@gwdg.de> To: Yuri <yuri@rawbw.com>, "ports@freebsd.org" <ports@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Not much reason to have */R-cran-* ports Message-ID: <0fc31bf6-8ce5-f918-bbd4-bb3d124a0deb@gwdg.de> In-Reply-To: <03cf592e-fd94-0228-8469-c9076583864f@rawbw.com> References: <791f8a7f-7f3e-2070-0be3-50494b1b2801@rawbw.com> <5AB15109.8010703@grosbein.net> <03cf592e-fd94-0228-8469-c9076583864f@rawbw.com>
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Am 20.03.2018 um 21:32 schrieb Yuri: > On 03/20/18 11:20, Eugene Grosbein wrote: >> It is a bit funny you are bothered on 250 R-cran-* ports when we have >> 1908 p5-* ports, >> 964 py-* ports, 600 rubygem-* ports and 280 hs-* ports in the single >> ports/devel category. >> >> Are you planning to ban and remove p5 ports too? Most of them should >> be from CPAN. >> We had BSDPAN for some time even... > > > You are missing the key differences: > > 1. Python and perl ports represent individually run software with their > own executables, when R doesn't. R packages are only useful in the > context of R, as building blocks of larger R programs only runnable in R > environment. R packages are much more dependent on environment. > > > 2. With python, there is a hope of having all major software pieces in > ports. With R there is no such hope. There are thousands of individual > small R packages, while we only have 250 in ports with no hope or reason > to add another few thousands. Now, if I want to use some R package > should I look it up in ports and try to port if it is missing? Of course > not, I will just install it from R. It's much easier this way, > > > Yuri > I think, the initial reason for creating R-cran ports was, that several of them should take care of needed non-R dependencies, like math/R-cran-sf, math/R-cran-nloptr, math/R-cran-igraph, databases/R-cran-RMySQL, and many others. A second reason was, that some of the original R packages have to be patched to build on FreeBSD, like devel/R-cran-Rcpp, textproc/R-cran-xml2, security/R-cran-openssl, and others. Without ports for those, some R packages are not installable and in many cases needed dependencies are missing. It seems, we need some (other) mechanism, which should take care of those R packages. Regards, Rainer
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