Re: [PATCH] gnu: r: Update to 3.3.1.

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

myglc2 <myglc2@gmail.com> writes:

> I imagine that, in the spirit of guix, we also want a user to be able to
> "help themself" instead of depending on a 'manager.' This would probably
> require an additional R "package manager component" that is usable by a
> manager or user. Such a thing would certainly showcase the unique
> capabilities of guix.

We have importers that generate Guix package expressions from CRAN or
Bioconductor.  Taken one step further we might have a transparent
wrapper to quickly install any version of a package even if it is not
yet part of Guix.

This might work like this:

* user issues “guix package --install --via cran gdtools@0.0.3”

* Guix runs the CRAN importe to recursively generate package expressions
  for “gdtools” at the given version.  The package does not have to
  exist in Guix yet.  The generated package expressions are cached
  somewhere (e.g. ~/.cache/guix/…genomation…).

* Guix loads the newly imported package expressions from
  ~/.cache/guix/…genomation… and tries to build them.

* Optionally, users can take the imported expressions, clean them up and
  send them as patches to us :)

This obviously depends on the quality of the importers, but I think it
wouldn’t take much effort to make this a reality.  The main problem with
offering magic like this is that it must be reliable or else it would
just be frustrating users.

At least for CRAN I think this is feasible.  (Bioconductor is a
different beast as versions would need to be given as Bioconductor SVN
revisions, which breaks the package boundaries.)

~~ Ricardo