[R-sig-Debian] cran2deb and Debian on cran

[Ross Boylan]

What is the relation between the cran2deb repository,
http://debian.cran.r-project.org/, and the debian repositories at CRAN,
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian/?  I've studied the pages and
this list, but am unsure I've got it right.

My understanding is that cran2deb had almost all packages, targets
testing, and currently is only supported for i386.

It appears the debian repo at CRAN provides backports of the core Debian
packages (which include R as well as R packages) only, for i386 and
amd64.

And then there's Debian backports, which should be ignored for R?

Is that right?

Concretely, if I'm on Debian stable amd64 and want an R package not
available from the official Debian distro, what are my choices?
I think I need to build from source (the package, not the whole of R).

If I pull a backported version of R into my system, could I also use
cran2deb (if willing to accept the archive being stale)?

Thanks.

P.S. This is not a question about the need for build-dependencies if I'm
building packages from source.  I (think I) understand that.