[R] Mandrake RPM's ... addio ?

[Michele Alzetta]

Hallo all;

I've built the usual Mandrake rpm for R 1.9.1, it will be picked up by
Martyn and subsequently propagate through CRAN in the next couple of
days or so. Impatient folk could also download a copy from a link on my
home page ( web.rossoalice.it/michele.alzetta/ ).

This time I've only prepared an rpm for mandrake 10.0 official, and the
reason is soon told: both my home systems have gone over to gentoo for
good, and installing a distro just for the purpose of building an rpm
which I'll never use (and will have little time to check and debug if
things go wrong) is already a rather foolish thing. Installing multiple
versions of the same distro for such a purpose is pure madness ! 

The usual SRPM I've made is of course available so that people with
mandrake 9.* can build their own rpm's. (Unfortunately mandrake cooker's
R is still back at 1.8.1, and in the last few years nobody at mandrake
has shown much real interest in maintaining this package - stable
versions of R have lacked an official R package for quite a while). 

My first build of an R rpm dates back to R 1.3.0 - summer 2001 (didn't
remember that - a quick search and to my surprise I found these old
rpm's still floating around on odd mirrors on the net) - so if nobody
else steps in I guess I'll keep on guaranteeing mdk rpms for the current
version ... but if any active mandrake user would like to try his hand
at this I'm available as a tutor :-)

-- 
Michele Alzetta <michele.alzetta at aliceposta.it>