[R-sig-Debian] Change in Ubuntu support policy

[Vincent Goulet]

Due to the increasing difficulty to maintain R backports for a three  
year old Ubuntu release, we are immediately dropping support for  
Ubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake". It also appears that few, if any, people  
were expecting an up-to-date version of R for Dapper on the desktop.

So far, our policy was to support all Ubuntu releases until their  
official end of life date. For Long Term Support (LTS) releases like  
Dapper and Hardy, this meant a five years commitment when R changes  
about every six months. We are now changing the policy to support all  
regular releases as before, but only the latest LTS release.  
Therefore, as of today, the officially supported releases are Jaunty  
Jakelope (9.04), Intrepid Ibex (8.10) and Hardy Heron (8.04).

We hope this will not cause major inconvenience to any useR on Ubuntu.

The Debian R packages (on which the Ubuntu ones are based) are  
maintained by Dirk Eddelbuettel and Doug Bates. The Ubuntu packages  
are compiled for amd64 by Michael Rutter and I maintain the i386 builds.


Vincent Goulet, Full Professor
École d'actuariat
Université Laval, Québec
vincent.goulet at act.ulaval.ca   http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca