[R-pkg-devel] Testing on old R versions

[Duncan Murdoch]

Thanks Dirk, Neal and Nathan.  I ended up going with Dirk's suggestion.

So far I haven't got it to work in 3.2.0; I probably won't put much 
effort into supporting that old version.  But it's fine in 3.4.0 and 
3.5.0, and I'm trying 3.3.0 now.  Rocker rocks!

P.S. rgl now installs in the basic r-base container, without adding 
additional libs.  This is due to some config checks that let it run on a 
barebones machine:  it can still produce WebGL output for a browser, it 
just can't show it on screen.

Duncan Murdoch


On 28/01/2021 11:42 a.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> 
> The Rocker Project provides both rocker/r-ver (with package snapshotting) as
> well as the (much smaller, just R) rocker/r-base images which are then passed
> on to the Docker team to become the official r-base image.
> 
> These go back to 3.1.3 with (almost if not all) interim releases, see
> 
>     https://hub.docker.com/_/r-base?tab=tags
> 
> and just use, say, 'docker pull r-base:3.2.0'
> 
> (Because they are available as these 'r-base' I initially didn't initially
> tag them at the rocker/r-base side so there tags only started at 3.6.3.)
> 
> For the use case of testing rgl you may need to find the appropriate opengl
> libraries for the particular release. These r-base images are all Debian
> based, and Debian has a handy 'time machine' feature in snapshot.debian.org
> which also lets you pick dates to install .deb binaries from. That should
> make rgl testing easy in case you need older versions of the build
> dependencies.
> 
> Dirk
>