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

[Thomas Petzoldt]

Hi Dirk,

thank you very much dirk for the quick response. I was aware that 
r-package-devel may not be the optimal place ;-) but hoped to address 
the right audience between r-devel and r-help.

Many thanks also for the suggestions, especially r2u and sorry for 
confusing the name of Michael.

Thomas

Am 09.08.2023 um 16:41 schrieb 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