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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 9 August 2023 at 16:26, Thomas Petzoldt wrote:
| 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

These days you also have r2u which has all of CRAN ie 20k binaries (each, for
two Ubuntu flavors). See  https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r2u
 
| This is indeed a great service, thanks to Dirk Edelbuettel, mark Rutter

That would be Michael 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.

If you use r2u (as I do on a laptop, an ec2 server, all my CI testing for
work and testing for months now) you get all packages and do not need to
mix.  Try r2u, it's good.
 
| 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.

That is very Debian / Ubuntu specific question.  Can I ask you to bring it to
the dedicated list r-sig-debian ?

>From the top of my head I can think of setting package status 'hold' (a
simpler per-package approach) or setting specific apt pinning values to not
alter packages from specific repos, see the manual pages.

But please ask on r-sig-debian. This list is for generic R packaging questions.

Thanks, Dirk

-- 
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org