[R-sig-Debian] Installation woes for rattle (and other packages)

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 3 February 2010 at 12:50, Prof. John C Nash wrote:
| Yesterday I wanted to try rattle on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. I had (and still have) it running 
| (though it complains on startup a bit -- I'll look into that later) on a different bootup 
| on the same machine with 8.04 Hardy.
| 
| I got an error that libglade cannot be found, and various attempts to get glade support 
| failed. I removed and reinstalled R -- same problem.
| 
| To avoid the issue of local setup being in conflict with R, I created a VirtualBox 
| instance of a clean Ubuntu Jaunty. Same woes. To be really sure of things, I put in a 
| virtual Debian lenny from debian-503-i386-netinst.iso
| 
| Since the Ubuntu cran2deb attempt gave same results as Debian lenny (though the CRAN 
| repository was a little different, but cran2deb repository the same), I'll only include 
| the Debian run. I also tried the install on a separate machine (real) running 8.04 Hardy 
| and got a similar broken packages message. So similar results on 4 systems.

There is no such thing as Ubuntu cran2deb. 

You are forcing something that is not supported.
 
[Lots of stuff deleted]

| The following packages have unmet dependencies:
|    r-cran-rattle: Depends: r-cran-rgtk2 but it is not going to be installed
|                   Depends: r-cran-pmml but it is not going to be installed
| E: Broken packages

This apt telling you that is cannot install rgtk2 and pmml because of
conflicts. It could give you more details if you asked.

As for installing Rattle by hand on Ubuntu: 

> install.packages("rattle", dependencies=TRUE)

I would suggest to set dependencies to FALSE.  

Moreover, it you look more closely, only pmml is _required_. So start with
that. Afterwards, rattle has a number of _suggested_ packages several of
which Ubuntu should have pre-built:

  r-cran-rgtk2
  r-cran-car
  r-cran-colorspace
  [...]

I would start with those and then add those packages that are missing.  We
will help you best as we can with whichever packages are missing.

But please consider switching from a chainsaw to a scalpel.

Hth, Dirk

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