[Rd] Compiling R-devel on older Linux distributions, e.g. RHEL / CentOS 7

[Iñaki Ucar]

On Wed, 8 Feb 2023 at 19:59, Henrik Bengtsson
<henrik.bengtsson using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I just want to add a few reasons that I know of for why users are
> still on Red Hat/CentOS 7 and learned from being deeply involved with
> big academic and research high-performance compute (HPC) environments.
> These systems are not like your regular sailing boat, but more like a
> giant container ship; much harder to navigate, slower to react, you
> cannot just cruise around and pop into any harbor you like to, or when
> you like to. It takes much more efforts, more logistics, and more
> people to operate them. If you mess up, the damage is much bigger.

I'm fully aware of, and I understand, all the technical and
organizational reasons why there are CentOS 7 systems out there. I
only challenge a single point (cherry-picked from your list):

> * The majority of users and sysadmins prefer stability over the being
> able to run the latest tools.

This is simply not true. In general, sysadmins do prefer stability,
but users want the latest tools (otherwise, this very thread would not
exist, QED). And the first thing is hardly compatible with the second
one. That is, without containers, which brings us to the next point.

> * Although you might want to tell everyone to just run a new version
> via Linux containers, it's not the magic sauce for all of the above.
> Savvy users might be able to do it, but not your average users. Also,
> this basically puts the common sysadmin burden on the end-user, who
> now have to keep their container stacks up-to-date and in sync.  In
> contrast to a homogeneous environment, this strategy increases the
> support burden on sysadms, because they will get much more questions
> and request for troubleshooting on very specific setups.

How is that so? Let's say a user wants the latest version of R.
Nothing prevents a sysadmin to set up a script called "R" in the PATH
that runs e.g. the r2u container [1] with the proper mounts. And
that's it: the user runs "R" and receives the latest version (and even
package installations seem to be blazing fast now!) without even
knowing that it's running inside a container.

I know, you are thinking "security", "permissions"...

$ yum install podman

Drop-in replacement for docker, but rootless, daemonless. Also there's
a similar thing called Apptainer [1], formerly Singularity, that was
specifically designed with HPC in mind, now part of the Linux
Foundation.

[1] https://github.com/eddelbuettel/r2u
[2] https://apptainer.org/

> What R Core, Gabor, and many others are doing, often silently in the
> background, is to make sure R works smoothly for many R users out
> there, whatever operating system and version they may be on. This is
> so essential to R's success, and, more importantly, for research and
> science to be able to move forward.

+1000

--
Iñaki Úcar