[R-sig-Debian] building from source after installing Debian packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 6 May 2005 at 17:14, Ramon Diaz-Uriarte wrote:
| (Apologies for double posting; I sent this to r-help and was suggested that I 
| ask here which I should probable have done to begin with).
| 
| ***************
| Dear All,
| 
| I've got into the habit of installing R from the precompiled Debian binaries, 
| including many of the packages from the r-cran-* Debian packages, and later 
| building from source (e.g., to link against Goto's BLAS, or to build patched 
| versions, etc). I install the newly built R to the very same place 
| (/usr/lib/R). This allows me to build and update R when I wish, AND provides 
| the ease of quickly updating many packages.
| 
| Things have always worked fine, but after a few funny problems (which could be 
| unrelated to the process itself) I've started wondering if this is a rather 
| silly thing to do, and if I should keep my own build separate from the Debian 
| stuff. Any advice would be much appreciated.

I don't think there is a silver bullet. It's a touch problem as you're mixing
two systems.

We plan to (eventually) provide all CRAN packages as apt-get'able .deb
packages. But I do not know how long it will take to get there. We have some
code to build the packages, and the code needs volunteers to test, correct,
extend, ... it.

OTOH as you're building the packages anyway for yourself, possibly for
several machines, it may make sense if you also start a 'community pool' into
which we're uploading Debian packages?  It is /really/ easy to build Debian
packages from CRAN sources, but some checking by actual users would surely
improve the overall quality.

Would that be interest?  Does anybody feel like prototyping this /
experimenting with it?

Cheers, Dirk

-- 
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he 
predicted yesterday didn't happen today.  --  Laurence J. Peter