[aur-general] Packaging all CRAN packages for R

[Alex Branham]

Hi all -

I'd like to use pacman to manage R packages, similar to how you can for
other languages (e.g. the python packages are all named python-*). There
are some packages available already, but not many (I count about 130
currently). I wrote a script[1] that generates PKGBUILDS for all the
packages on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). There's 12,593
packages on CRAN as of today.

If you evaluate the script, then call write_all_pkgbuilds(), R will put
each PKGBUILD into PKGBUILDS/r-cran-<pkgname>/PKGBUILD. Here's an
example of the output.[2] It doesn't generate .SRCINFO or setup a git
repo (yet). It also doesn't take into account (yet) that there are
already 130ish R packages on the AUR. I named them r-cran-* rather than
r-* because 1) it's clearer where the packages are coming from and 2)
it's a pain to search for r-*

Is this something people would like to have in the AUR? I figured I
should ask before adding ~12.5k packages.

Any and all comments/feedback appreciated!

Thanks,
Alex

Footnotes:
[1]  https://github.com/jabranham/r-cran-pkgbuilds/blob/master/gen-R-PKGBUILDS.R
[2]

# Maintainer: Alex Branham <email-address-removed>
_cranname=A3
_cranver=1.0.0
pkgname=r-cran-a3
pkgver=1.0.0
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Supplies tools for tabulating and analyzing the results of predictive models. The methods employed are applicable to virtually any predictive model and make comparisons between different methodologies straightforward."
url="https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/${_cranname}/index.html"
arch=('x86_64')
license=('GPL')
depends=('r-cran-xtable' 'r-cran-pbapply')

optdepends=('r-cran-randomforest' 'r-cran-e1071')

source=("https://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/${_cranname}_${_cranver}.tar.gz")
md5sums=('027ebdd8affce8f0effaecfcd5f5ade2')
package() {
  mkdir -p ${pkgdir}/usr/lib/R/library
  cd ${srcdir}
  R CMD INSTALL ${_cranname} -l ${pkgdir}/usr/lib/R/library
}