This is essentially a '2.0' version of earlier work with Steffen Moeller and David Vernazobres which we had presented in 2007. Then, the approach was top-down and monolithic which started to show its limits. This time, the idea was to borrow the successful bottom-up approach of my CRANberries feed.
The bulk of the work was done by Charles Blundell as part of his Google Summer of Code 2008 project which I had suggested and mentored. After that project had concluded, we both felt we should continue with it and bring it to 'production'. The CRAN hosts provided us with a (virtual Xen) machine to build on, and we are now ready to more publically announce the availability of the repositories for i386 and amd64:
deb http://debian.cran.r-project.org/cran2deb/debian-i386 testing/and
deb http://debian.cran.r-project.org/cran2deb/debian-amd64 testing/
A few more details are provided in our presentation slides. We look forward to hearing from folks using; the r-sig-debian list may be a good venue for this.