[R-sig-Debian] Ubuntu 64

[Johannes Ranke]

Hi Christ, hi list,
dear CRAN maintainers (copying in CRAN because of a suggestion not to
use frames on CRAN)

* Chris Evans <chrishold at psyctc.org> [070914 01:30]:
> Johannes Ranke sent the following  at 11/08/2007 20:07:
> > Hi Chris, hi list
> > 
> > * Chris Evans <chrishold at psyctc.org> [070802 09:00]:
> >> Emmanuel Charpentier sent the following  at 26/07/2007 15:18:
> >>> Dear sig-R-Debian
> >>>
> >>> I'd like to second Christophe Bonenfan's plea for an up-to-date Ubuntu
> >>> 64 (and maybe an up-to-date Debian 64) repository(ies). There seems to
> >> ... and for me it's particularly Debian 64 stable.  I'm more
> >> psychotherapist than dental surgeon ... but otherwise Emmanuel's
> >> self-description fits well!
> > 
> > Are there any problems with the amd64 backports for Debian stable on
> > CRAN that I should know of?
> 
> Very belated reply to this.  First of all, many, many thanks for all
> you're doing Johannes.

You're certainly welcome!
 
> I've only just had time to come back to using R on my server and I
> realised I was being a bit dumb and that the Debian upgrade policy and
> the remarkable generosity of the R project probably meant I'd have to
> tweak /etc/apt/sources.list and point at some source other than the main
> Debian stable one.
> 
> Two points that may help others though:
> 1) The crucial information about how to do it is in CRAN, for my local
> depository it's at:
> 
> http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/linux/debian/
> 
> I think the frames system used by CRAN can make the URL you're at a bit
> unclear (Firefox shows I'm at http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/ as the key
> page is an frame on that page, one has just been jumped to a single page
> of http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/linux/debian/

Yes, I would prefer a website without frames as well. This could be done
by wrapping some php around the HTML pages - any volunteers? :)
I don't know if this has been discussed before by the CRAN and R website
maintainers.

> What it says there is that you need:
> "deb http://<favorite-cran-mirror>/bin/linux/debian stable/"
> in your /etc/apt/sources.list
> 
> I, perhaps stupidly, put in:
> "deb http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/bin/linux/debian stable/"
> 
> and got an file not found error as it's actually:
> "deb http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/bin/linux/debian stable/"
> 
> I think either the listing of the CRAN mirror or that line in that file
> need to be changed to make mapping clearer.

Right now, when looking at the CRAN mirror list, I only find

UK
	http://cran.uk.r-project.org/	University of Bristol

which is then correctly redirected to

	http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/

> 2) the other problem I hit was that not all the packages seem to have
> CRC values stored for them so you get a warning from dselect and have to
> realise that the default is _not_ to ignore it, to be more precise, I
> had to confirm twice in effect that was ignoring it.

I don't know about CRC values, and haven't used dselect since many
years, but it might be worthwile to import my gpg key as suggested in
the README, maybe then this would go away.

> However, up and running like a dream and interestingly it immediately
> solved a problem I was having with sink(): clearly it had been a bug and
> had been fixed!  Wonderful!

Great!
 
> Many thanks Johannes and sorry if I spread confusion!

No problem. Of course it's important for me to know where the pitfalls
are.

Best regards,

Johannes

> 
> Very best all,
> 
> Chris
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Chris Evans <chris at psyctc.org> Skype: chris-psyctc
> Professor of Psychotherapy, Nottingham University;
> Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, Notts PDD network;
> Research Programmes Director, Nottinghamshire NHS Trust;
> *If I am writing from one of those roles, it will be clear. Otherwise*
> *my views are my own and not representative of those institutions    *

-- 
Dr. Johannes Ranke                 jranke at uni-bremen.de     Key ID: F649AF90
UFT Bremen, Leobenerstr. 1         +49 421 218 63373
D-28359 Bremen                     http://www.uft.uni-bremen.de/chemie/ranke