[R-sig-Debian] Upgrading R packages on Etch

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 2:39 AM, Ted Harding
<Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
> Greetings,
> I've been trying to upgrade R packages on my Debian Etch
> (whose other upgrades I have been cheerfully going along
> with as they occur).
[snip]
>
>  The following upgrades will be skipped:
>  [Same list as above]
>
> The "Mark All Upgrades" suggestion for synaptic didn't seem
> to do anything.
>
> So I'm stuck. Any advice/information/suggestions?
>

I suppose the easiest first step is to run apt-get with the --verbose option.

Here is what I would do (old school approach).

Download the deb files in question.
they may already be downloaded, in /var/cache/apt somewhere

then try to manually install them with "dpkg -i *.deb"

The errors you get will be much more informative.

My old man opinion has always been that apt-get tries to make this too
simple.  It is virtually certain that those R debs were built with
different shared libraries than you have, and for your system there
are no appropriate updates for those shared libraries. So the r
packages are held back, but they don't say why.

If you don't want to upgrade your system's shared libraries, it may be
 you can build your own R with the libraries you have.  The way to try
 is to do "apt-get source  r" (or whatever the R package is called) to
get the source code and debian packaging, and see if you can build
packages for your system by running "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot" in
the directory where it has downloaded the code.  apt-get source will
grab the original tarball, the diff file, open the code, patch it, so
it is literally waiting there for you to try to build it.

And the errors you get there will be very informative.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas