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hafen / rminiconda

Install and maintain isolated miniconda Python installations from R
Apache License 2.0
67 stars 4 forks source link

Shut up and take my money! (Or at least get it into CRAN) #5

Closed LTLA closed 5 years ago

LTLA commented 5 years ago

I have been exploring ways to reliably use Python code from Bioconductor packages (see my latest efforts here). Currently, the solution to guarantee that a given version of Python is available is to download the Python sources and recompile them on the target machine. This is about as disgusting as it sounds, especially on Windows.

If rminiconda were available on CRAN, we could just piggyback off the Python instance installed by rminiconda. There's still a little bit of work to do - we need to perform our own package version management on top - but it would make life a lot easier for us. Some testing indicates that it even solves our OpenSSL problem (LTLA/basilisk#1).

Also happy to push stuff the other way if any of our Python package management functionality in basilisk seems useful to you... saves me from having to maintain another package...

hafen commented 5 years ago

Nice - I started down the path of compiling and gave up - you have more patience than I do!

It's good to see efforts like this and others (like #4). I'm not entirely certain about the future of this package (CRAN, etc.) since there is ongoing work to integrate this functionality into reticulate. If that ends up looking like a good universal solution then I'm happy to concentrate efforts there. However, if there is enough feedback that a separate package would be useful for other purposes, I'm open to that.

LTLA commented 5 years ago

Yes, based on discussions in LTLA/basilisk#2, it seems like this functionality might be provided in reticulate itself, in which case you're right - there wouldn't be a need for a separate package.

Nonetheless, until that solution becomes available, I took the liberty of stealing the relevant parts of your code and sticking it into basilisk's configure files. So it's getting some use, at least!