[R-pkg-devel] preventing auto-update of R and c2d4u r-cran-* packages on Ubuntu 22.04

[Thomas Petzoldt]

Hi,

I am running a couple of  shiny servers with several apps that are based 
around own CRAN packages. It worked stable for years, but due to the 
growing number of packages, the compile time for regular manual package 
installation and updates became inconvenient.

Therefore, I have been very happy to use pre-compiled packages from the 
c2d4u repository: deb 
https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/c2d4u.team/c2d4u4.0+/ubuntu/ jammy main

This is indeed a great service, thanks to Dirk Edelbuettel, mark Rutter 
and the complete team! The downside is, that now the r-cran-* binaries 
are installed automatically, together with the system update. I 
experienced now repeated cases that crashed some of the shiny apps, 
mainly due to conflicts between the binary packages and other packages 
installed from sources.

My question: what is best practise, to disallow automatic updates for 
all r-cran-* packages? Uncommenting the complete package source in the 
apt/sources.list.d/cd4u...list file? Fiddling around with  
/etc/apt/preferences ?

The ideal approach would be to put a plain textfile of all installed 
r-cran packages somewhere to the system, where packages that are to be 
upgraded (or oppositely: pinned) are just commented or outcommented.

Thanks in advance,

Thomas