[R-sig-Debian] [ANNOUNCEMENT] cran2deb: 1700+ new Debian / R packages

[Markus Jantti]

I'd like to second this. While R's install.packages() mechanism is very good,
nothing in my experience beats the Debian way of installing packages. Many
thanks to Charles and Dirk for providing this service to Debian users.

I will certainly try to provide feedback once I get behind a decent internet
connection and can install package en-masse (rather than from beind my current
the tethered iPhone provided GPRS connection that I am using to send this message).

Thanks,

Markus

Piet Plomp wrote:
> Hi Dirk and Charles,
> 
> What a _beautiful_ project! This a giant step forward.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Piet
> 
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 03:44:21PM -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>> Announcing cran2deb: 1700+ Debian packages from almost all of CRAN
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Last Friday's presentation at UseR! 2009 was the first really public mention
>> of 'cran2deb'. It provides Debian packages of all of CRAN. It started as
>> Charles' project from last year's Google Summer of Code, was further extended
>> by us over the last year.
>>
>> We currently build for the testing distribution and the i386 and amd64
>> architectures. This is now publically useable and we welcome wider testing
>> by Debian users. We hope to extend this to Ubuntu during the summer or fall.
>>
>> I include what I blogged earlier (which you may have seen via Planet Debian
>> and/or Planet R).  This also contains the /etc/apt/sources.list entries:
>>
>>
>>    cran2deb: Would you like 1700+ new Debian / R packages ?
>>
>>    As I mentioned in my [8]quick write-up of UseR 2009, one of my talks
>>    was about cran2deb: a system to turn (essentially) all [1]CRAN packages
>>    into directly apt-get-able binary packages.
>>
>>    This is essentially a '2.0' version of earlier work with Steffen
>>    Moeller and David Vernazobres which we had presented in 2007. Then, the
>>    approach was top-down and monolithic which started to show its limits.
>>    This time, the idea was to borrow the successful bottom-up approach of
>>    my [2]CRANberries feed.
>>
>>    The bulk of the work was done by Charles Blundell as part of his Google
>>    Summer of Code 2008 project which I had suggested and mentored. After
>>    that project had concluded, we both felt we should continue with it and
>>    bring it to 'production'. The CRAN hosts provided us with a (virtual
>>    Xen) machine to build on, and we are now ready to more publically
>>    announce the availability of the repositories for i386 and amd64:
>>
>>       deb http://debian.cran.r-project.org/cran2deb/debian-i386 testing/
>>
>>    and
>>   
>>       deb http://debian.cran.r-project.org/cran2deb/debian-amd64 testing/
>>
>>    A few more details are provided in [3]our presentation slides. We look
>>    forward to hearing from folks using; the r-sig-debian list may be a
>>    good venue for this.
>>
>>
>>    References
>>    1. http://cran.r-project.org/
>>    2. http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries
>>    3. http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/papers/useR2009cran2deb.pdf
>>
>>
>> Please direct questions to r-sig-debian (which has subscriber-only posts) or
>> debian-science. 
>>
>> Regards,  Dirk and Charles
>>  
>> -- 
>> Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
>>
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-- 
Markus Jantti
Professor of Economics
Swedish Institute for Social Research
Stockholm University