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

[Vincent Goulet]

Scotti,

Building packages from source is a difficult thing on Windows, but it is trivial on Linux in general and on Debian in particular. (Ok, but for a few "complicated" packages.) As stated in the Ubuntu README on CRAN, installing the r-base-dev package will install all the standard tools you need tom compile R packages. Then, a simple

install.packages("foo")

at the command line will fetch the sources of foo on CRAN, compile the package and install it. It's all completly transparent and no more complicated than installing on Windows, IMO.

Vincent

Le 2010-07-09 à 06:40, Scotti Roberto a écrit :

> 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.
>> 
>> 
> 
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