Re: [outreachy] Further steps

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hi Laura,

>> > If you have any other favourite packages, you can give them also a try.
>> > It could just get more difficult, with more manual steps, other build
>> > systems, dependencies to be packed first, code to be patched, etc.
>> >
>>
>> Yes, this would also be good. Please tell us if you have any specific package
>> in mind.
> I guess I could package some more R packages, and then let me know
> which ones you think are more convenient, or you find more appealing
> for Guix.

All free R packages on CRAN are appealing from my perspective.  You can
also pick a package from Bioconductor, which might be a tad more
difficult, as that could depend not only on other Bioconductor packages
but also packages on CRAN.  Note that the importer does not
automatically switch between downloading from Bioconductor to
downloading from CRAN, so you may have to run the importer more than
once.

Use “guix import cran -a bioconductor -r PACKAGE” — when it aborts you
may have stumbled upon an unpackaged CRAN package.

R packages from Bioconductor should be added to the (gnu packages
bioconductor) module.

As far as learning new things goes: R packages usually are very simple.
They rarely ever require changes to the build system, so you don’t get
to learn about the “arguments” field of the “package” DSL.

Alternatively, you could look into making changes to the Texinfo
documentation.  For the project you would need to be somewhat familiar
with the manual, so it can’t hurt if you would edit it a little.  An
easy edit is to add a handful of “@cindex” lines to places in the manual
that currently miss them.  A “@cindex” line adds a location in the
manual to the index for a given keyword, so that people can find
relevant places in the manual more easily.

--
Ricardo