Many R packages are "noarch" and shoud be installed in /usr/share/R/library. Can this be supported?
Well, for starters, none of the R packages in Fedora are "noarch". Can you give me an example of a noarch R package?
Well, currently in extras the only candidate I think is R-mAr. I've also packaged R-systemfit for local use and was planning on submitting to Fedora when I noticed this issue. Spec and source are at http://www.cora.nwra.com/~orion/fedora. It seems to make sense to make R-mAr and R-systemfit noarch and install them in the same location (/usr/share/R or /usr/lib/R, I don't really care) on i386 and x86_64. But it seems like R will only look in /usr/lib/R/library and /usr/lib64/R/library respectively. This may be too hard to change, and it definitely should be an upstream thing.
Among 56 R packages I packaged as dependencies of R-mFilter, 21 seems to be noarch. They are not necessarily well packaged nor suitable for fedora. R-car R-DAAG R-dynlm R-Ecdat R-fCalendar R-fEcofin R-its R-mFilter R-oz R-pastecs R-qcc R-RColorBrewer R-RTisean R-sandwich R-scatterplot3d R-sem R-strucchange R-systemfit R-TeachingDemos R-xtable R-zoo
Added support for /usr/share/R/library to R-2.4.1-4 (for FC-5, FC-6, devel). Please reopen this bug if noarch packages do not work properly.
Another issue we have to consider: Currently, R packages do the following in %post/%postun: cat /usr/lib/R/library/*/CONTENTS > /usr/lib/R/doc/html/search/index.txt which assumes all packages are in /usr/lib/R/library, and that /usr/lib/R/doc/html/search/ exists. Can we also have a /usr/share/R/library/doc/html/search/ directory? Do we just move the exitsting one there (and have to update all R packages)? I'm not really sure what functionality this provides.