[R-sig-Debian] Please be careful with R 3.4.2 upgrades via CRAN, launchpad, ...

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Please be careful with upgrades to R 3.4.2.

To cut a long story short, this has to do with minor internal changes in R
3.4.0 from April which require _some_ packages to be rebuilt. I argued for
that approach (ie: incremental, careful, no side effects) within Debian, and
lost.  The _official_ packages in Debian now carry a new tag r-api-3.4 (as
opposed to previous r-api-3) in order to force clean updates with matching
packages.

But matching packages is the key. _Everyting_ needs to be rebuilt.

We will get there.  In the meantime, do not install an r-base-core providing
r-api-3.4.  I failed to give Michael a heads-up so the PPA builds he so
promptly provides carried this for a moment. I am right now rebuilding R
3.4.2 in my PPA with a r-api-3 tag for transition.  Those should work once we
have zesty, yakkety, xenial, trusty, ... images as needed.

Michael and I will figure out how and where to go from here to meet that
requirement of r-api-3.4 with limited disruption.

Thanks to Jeroen for crying wolf on Twitter, as little as I like to discuss
issues there it is still a good news beacon. (And for now mailing here too.)

I'll post updates.  Working with r-api-3, and of course paying attention to
what apt tells us should work fine. "Should".

Dirk

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