[R-sig-Debian] A guide to R packages for Ubuntu

[Dominique Belhachemi]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Michael Rutter <marutter.psu at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 30, 2012, at 2:20 PM, Dominique Belhachemi <domibel at debian.org> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 5:13 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 30 July 2012 at 15:51, Dominique Belhachemi wrote:
>>> | Hi everyone,
>>> |
>>> | I am using the backports from
>>> | http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/lucid/ on Lucid and would
>>> | like to create a bunch of additional r-cran packages on my workstation.
>>> |
>>> | Where can I find the latest scripts to automatically create those
>>> | packages? Is https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/cran2deb/ still
>>> | up-to-date?
>>>
>>> For Ubuntu, your best bet is Michael's PPA.  AFAIK it covers "a large number"
>>> of package but does not quite have complete CRAN coverage.  See
>>>
>>>    https://launchpad.net/~marutter/+archive/c2d4u
>>>
>>>
>>> For Debian, the less-well-known but equally impressive effort is by Don. See
>>>
>>>    http://debian-r.debian.net/
>>>
>>>
>>> Our old cran2deb codebase is still there and at the core of both of these,
>>> but they essentially branches or "v3.0" implementations.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks Dirk,
>>
>> http://debian-r.debian.net/ is what I need for Debian.
>>
>> For Ubuntu, Michael's PPA is huge, but contains only 1 package for
>> Lucid. So I will be using Don's github script's to re-build the
>> packages I need.
>>
>> Thanks
>> -Dominique
>
> I started working on c2d4u after lucid and decided it was going to be a lot of work to start backporting, so I have been concentrating on the latest releases.
>
> However, it should be possible to use "apt-get source" with the c2d4u installed in lucid as only "deb-src", ignore the "deb" part when adding the ppa to the /etc/apt/sources.list.  You would want to use the natty series of source packages, as they will be as close to lucid as possible.  That way you can download and build from the source packages, at least allowing you to install the necessary dependencies via "apt-get build-dep foo".
>
> Two words of caution with this approach.
>
> 1.  Do not add the "deb" line to sources.list.  It will cause havoc looking for natty packages that do not exist.
>
> 2.  Even if you use the natty source packages, lucid will not have the required versions for some of the dependencies.  This issue will still exist if you use Don's github scripts, as there are differences between lucid version numbers and what CRAN packages want.  Many of the packages will work fine, but there will be some that will not build due to newer versions of packages not available under lucid.
>

Thank you Michael,

I will try both, rebuilding your natty source packages, and using
cran2deb for building new R packages from scratch (those which are not
available in the repos).

-Dominique