Greetings, and apologies for the braino leading to my first posting to
the general list. I'm reposting here, and changing how I attached the
files; they were hard to work with in the other post.
There's a coalescing group which is working to imitate Dirk's fine
translation of CRAN to APT, in the Fedora/Red-Hat flavored land.
One of the things we're trying to do is implement as much as is
possible in R directly, and use as much of the existing package
management infrastructure as we can.
To this end, I humbly submit a few small patches to that
infrastructure.
The first of the two patches below is the more important one; It adds
to 'getDependencies' an 'installed' option, defaulting to NULL.
This
permits us to specify a counterfactual set of "installed packages".
With this option in place, we can ask getDependencies "What would
someone need, to install this package, if they only had -thus-
installed".
In practice, -thus-, for us, attempts to be "just the base packages".
The second of the two patches is more cosmetic. getDependencies is
quite verbose about what it's doing, and it would be nice to be able
to mask the merely informative messages. The patch adds a 'verbose'
option, defaulting to TRUE. This permits us to turn off the message()
about "Oh, I'm doing this too". The second patch includes the
functionality of the first.
Currently, I'm using a copied-and-pasted version of getDependencies,
with my hacks in place and some moderately evil namespace traipsing to
get at the rest of the utilities. I would much rather make use of the
code in situ.
