[R-sig-Debian] Can't install R 2.15 and r-recommended on Ubuntu

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Paul,

Super-briefly as I am at work:

On 8 November 2013 at 13:12, Paul Gilbert wrote:
| I may have misunderstood the first question in this thread, but now that 
| I have a vague idea what Travis-CI is about, perhaps someone could 
| answer some questions (apologies if I have not yet grokked the proper 
| terminology):

A lot of stuff got discussed in the 'Issue' tickets on GH. You can browse
them there.  For better or worse, kids these days don't use mailing lists ...

| 
| -An R package would often require other R packages in order to build and 
| test. Would the strategy for making other packages available be to use 
| "install", or "before_script"? Potentially this settup will take very 
| much more time than the actual testing, or is there a way to easy this 
| load?

Rock, meet hard place.

Until R and key packages are in a pre-build image used by Travis, that time
has to be spent.  It is a tough job to contribute to global warming and
burning cpu cycles and disk spins, but someone has got to do it ...
 
| -Are you thinking of all packages being available via apt-get, or will 
| this support "R CMD INSTALL"?

A mix, because there is no complete CRAN archive accessible via apt-get on an
Ubuntu platform.
 
| -How do the virtual machine snapshots get set up? Is that what is being 
| done in the R+Travis project, or what would be needed to merge this into 
| travis as a first-class citizen?

The intent is to do so much good work in the r-travis project that Travis-CI
notices and promotes R to a first-class language.  We have a good shot at that.
 
| -Is there a mechanism to contribute worker boxes for specific platforms? 
| Is it possible to restrict them to be available only for certain 
| purposes? (e.g. R package builds but not C++ project testing.)

I do not fully understand the question.

r-travis specific questions are kinda misplaced here.  Maybe create an Issue
ticket at Github.

| -Is this thread on R-sig-debian only because the original question was 
| about installing on Ubuntu? I have the impression that the Travis-CI 
| infrastructure is more general than debian, or am I wrong about that?.

I think Kirill was lost in an apt-get attempt and asked here which makes
perfect sense as this is the place for R on Debian/Ubuntu deployment
questions.
 
| WRT my original misunderstanding: I do think you need to think of R and 
| recommended packages as one combined compiler system, not try to test 
| newer recommended packages against older R versions. I don't think 
| mixing new recommended packages with old R versions should be expected 
| to work very well, and (I hope) very few people would think of using a 

Agreed, and most of us disagree with what Kirill tried there. Arguably, he
was just trying for a creative shortcut, but the better solution would be to
have several Ubuntu release (say, current plus LTS plus maybe the upcoming
one for bleeding edge) under Travis. A shortcut remains a shortcut, and is
ill-advised in something designed to be "the" QA and Testing framework.

| mixed system. Even installing from source you get them together. OTOH, 
| testing new versions of other packages against old versions of R (with 
| the corresponding recommended packages) makes sense if the package 
| maintainer has not indicated that a newer R version is needed.

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com