[R-sig-Debian] "Graphics history" in UNIX

[Scotti Roberto]

Dear Liviu and Paul, many thanks for answering.
Up to a certain extent I can spend efforts and time playing around in 
building the tools I need to work.
My major concern are the students. If I want them to concentrate on the 
work, building the tools should be BESIDE THE POINT!
Maybe Pauls suggestion could help in that case.
Roberto

Il 09/07/2010 01:26, Liviu Andronic ha scritto:
> Dear Roberto
>
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 3:41 PM, Scotti Roberto<roberto.scotti at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> stimulates a very basic question: "Is it possible to avoid building from
>> source using R in Kubuntu?
>>      
> Yes.
>    
>> I shifted over from MS only recently. In Windows I used to easily download
>> packages and use them.
>> Now, every time I downloaded a new piece, I had the impression that building
>> from source was necessary.
>> Am I wrong?
>>      
> No. Because of the huge diversity of Linux platforms it is not
> practical to provide binaries for all or even most of them. Hence, as
> a general rule, under Linux you need to compile R packages.
>
> On Debian-based distros you can circumvent and use cran2deb (reference
> provided by Paul). Beware though that cran2deb specifically targets
> Debian testing i386 and amd64 (support for the latter is temporarily
> dead). Dirk has repeatedly warned against using them on Ubuntus, but
> there were reports of successful usage so you might want to try it,
> too.
>
> Regards
> Liviu
>
>    
Il 09/07/2010 00:36, Paul Johnson ha scritto:
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Scotti Roberto<roberto.scotti at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> Hello.
>> I understand that, to build from source, you need to have all sources (in
>> the right place and with the right names, and so on),
>> but your sentence,
>>      
>>> To build from source you need to have development files installed.
>>>        
>> stimulates a very basic question: "Is it possible to avoid building from
>> source using R in Kubuntu?
>>      
> Personally, my opinion is if you want somebody else to do your work
> for you, you should have stayed with Windows.
>
> Luckily for you, some other people are nice and want to build packages
> for you.  There is a deb archive called "cran2deb"  that does build
> many packages, there's no "guarantee" they will work with all the
> stuff you have installed.
>
> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/papers/useR2009cran2deb.pdf
>
> Here's the reason there's no guarantee. Nobody can anticipate whatever
> changes you have made to your system--that's the beauty of Linux. So
> if you build your own, they always fit.  But if you stick with default
> everything, the cran2deb will work.
>
>