Packaging software from the CRAN for Guix

Guix shell, together with direnv and Emacs integration, is a lovely tool for installing R packages.

Guix already carries a lot of CRAN-packages, but sometimes I need something not already packaged, at the moment the mfp package.

To help my memory, here is a R function that takes a R package name and returns a tibble with all the information needed to write a Guix package:

library(dplyr);
library(glue);
library(tibble);

metadata_for_guix_packages <- function(package_name)
                                        # Ask R for package details
  available.packages()[package_name, c("Depends",
                                                                "Imports",
                                                                "Suggests",
                                                                "License",
                                                                "Version",
                                                                "Repository")] |>
    as_tibble_row() |>
                                        # Get sha256 from guix download
    (\(x)
      add_column(x, system2(command = "guix",
                                            args = c("download",
                                                           glue("{x$Repository}/{package_name}_{x$Version}.tar.gz")),
                                            stdout = TRUE)[2]))() |>
                                        # Clean up return value
    select(-Repository) |>
    rename("SHA256" = "...[]");

With the output of metadata_for_guix_packages("mfp"), we can easily cobble together a working Guix package definition:

(define r-mfp
  (package
    (name "r-mfp")
    (version "1.5.4.1")
    (source
     (origin
       (method url-fetch)
       (uri (cran-uri "mfp" version))
       (sha256
        (base32 "17sww972ymnddbi54575hdalbshfq81m849795pmi38j3mrhz25m"))))
    (build-system r-build-system)
    (propagated-inputs (list r-survival r-numderiv))
    (native-inputs (list r-knitr r-markdown))
    (home-page "https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/mfp/index.html")
    (synopsis "R package for regression modelling using fractional polynomial functions")
    (description "Fractional polynomials are used to represent curvature in regression models. A key reference is Royston and Altman, 1994.")
    (license gpl2)))