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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 10 November 2009 at 12:17, Paul Johnson wrote:
| 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.

Correct.

| 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

I object to this characterisation.  The backports on CRAN are built using the
best available tools, and this includes chroot / pbuilder environments with
the proper libraries.  Johannes (for Debian) and Vincent / Michael (for
Ubuntu) deserve better for their work than statements like that.

| 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 caelled) to

That is generally true and fair advice. I often go this route when _backports
are not available_ but in this case they are.  Hence no need for from-source
rebuilds.  

| 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.

apt-get can actually build the package for you too, see the 
'man apt-get' about the --compile option.

Dirk

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