On 11/21/2014 11:22 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
I think the Fedora policy requires more of a commitment from maintainers than I can offer. In any event, I know RStudio Server can be built from source on Fedora and that it works but it needs a lot of detailed attention to turn it into something that will make it into a release. It has a few dependencies - gwt, for one - that aren't in Fedora so their source needs to be packaged in the source RPM.

There's also the question of upstream - they have a build process that makes usable binaries for openSUSE and Fedora but only support the server on Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and CentOS. I did get them to fix some issues when their run-time dependencies messed up a Fedora R upgrade, but I don't know if they'd actively participate in a distro packaging effort. They'd need to be asked.

All that said, this is a good time to start such a project, since Fedora 21 is about two weeks away from release. I have a COPR project opened but haven't put anything in it yet - https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/znmeb/rstudio/

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 8:38 PM, Suchakra <suchakra@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
Hi,

> What do you say, Ed?  If I get the package review done, will you help with
> bugs and maintenance?
>
> --Pete

I am using RStudio actively on Fedora using the rpm they provide.
Though it works just about satisfactorily for me standalone,  it would
really be nice to have it in our repos. I can help in testing/bugs and
occasional maintenance.

--
Suchakra



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I just glanced at their github repo.. wow.  https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/releases - it looks like they are tagging a 'release' every time they touch the code.  There's also a lot of bundling; probably not an insurmountable amount, but it won't be an easy one to package.

As for upstream suppport... well, the bundling is indicative of how they'd probably feel about keeping up with our dependency churn.  It isn't uncommon for upstreams to not actively participate in the packaging process, but if they're taking the stance where 'we only support the latest release (ha!) with these specific versions of deps' it would be a nightmare. Detailed attention is right :)

Anyway, I'll keep an eye on this thread and if there's enough interest, I'll happily participate in the packaging.  Still definitely more than I want to take on alone - but it does look like an interesting challenge.

-- 
-- Pete