[R-sig-Debian] switch to 4.2 for r-base packages

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Chris this question in private mail, and as it is a generally valid question,
I resending my answere here (with Chris' approval).

Cheers, Dirk



Hi Chris,

Always good to hear from a user.  This would have a been a good question for
the r-sig-debian list, many R users on Debian and Ubuntu lurk there,
incl. our porters.

On 25 September 2007 at 09:02, Chris Roat wrote:
| Hi Dirk,
| 
| I put together the R packages for some analysts in my group and was
| wondering why the jump to 4.2 for compilers in the r-base packages?  I'm

Two answers:  The formal one is that Debian always builds on its 'unstable'
branch, and I think this happens to be the default compiler there.  

The informal one is in also in
/usr/share/doc/debian/r-base-core/changelog.Debian.gz:

r-base (2.5.1~20070625-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Second release candidate for R 2.5.1 expected for June 28

  * To ensure successful builds involving Fortran, we need to explicitlu 
    select the gcc-4.2 versions of the the compiler suite in debian/rules, 
    and per Build-Depends in debian/control as well as the Depends for 
    r-base-dev.  Backporters will probably need to revert this to 4.1.
    Thanks to Michael Ablassmeier and Lucas Nussbaum for the heads-up.

| back on a ubuntu dapper system, and I was able to build the 2.5.0 r-base
| packages with 4.0 no problem.  What made the jump to 4.2 necessary for
| version 2.5.1?  (BTW, I'm newish to building on debian/ubuntu - is there any
| way to find the debian source packages for 2.5.0 if I just want to build
| those?)

Your predicament is in fact an old one, as we made this for R 2.5.1 a few
months back.  But what you (and unfortunately too many others) may not know
is that .... there are pre-built Debian and Ubuntu packages on the __CRAN__
as opposed to Ubuntu mirrors.  See the R FAQ for details, or the READMEs at
	http://cran.us.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README.html

So our trusted porters already made the minor adjustment to debian/control
(for the Build-Depends) and debian/rules (for the compiler vars) for you!!
All you need is apt-get update and install (once you augmented
/etc/apt/sources.list).

Lastly, I can ensure that this all works because I basically do the same
thing myself with the Debian releases at work where I run Ubuntu on a few
machines.

Hth, Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.