[R-sig-Debian] Advice on upgrading to 3.5.0

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Robin,

Thanks for asking here rather than on Twitter. I am old-school and think this
is a better place / more searchable / more easy to expand.

On 2 May 2018 at 09:35, Robin Lovelace wrote:
| I'd be interested to hear views on how and when Ubuntu users should upgrade
| to R 3.5.0.
| 
| I made the upgrade a few days ago but reverted because of issues installing
| packages such as rJava, which I installed on the system with r-cran-rjava.
| 
| Also any advice on how to do a clean uninstall of the previous version
| before making the leap greatly appreciated.

I guess it all depends. You really need to ensure you have no old r-cran-*
packages with binary code left as that code would not load.

So if in doubt, don't upgrade.

Check your system, do 'dpkg -l | grep r-cran' (and/or r-bioc).  Use 'apt
cache policy r-cran-abc' to check on a (hypothetical) package abc.  (We have
RcppAPT to query apt from R too.)

For Ubuntu, we opted for some flexibility by NOT imposing the r-api-3*
tags. If you want, and know what you are doing, you _can_ upgrade now, use
what is available as binaries (r-recommended plus some more) and then
complement with local installation into /usr/local/lib/R/site-packages to
complete your system. It is what I do as I tend to install a lot from CRAN
directly.

For Debian, we do not have that option. An upgrade will only be available
once everything has been rebuilt for r-api-3.5, or else all old packages will
get uninstalled -- which may not be what one wants.

I would be happy to hear what others think.  Jeroen already voiced his
support for also making Ubuntu 'harder' to upgrade by adding the tag. I am
still on the fence on that -- to me, having the flexibility seems worth the
risk of shooting one's foot off -- but I may be in the minority.

As a start, we can probably collect the names of a few 'harder to install'
packages that should go to the new repo sooner rather than later. rJava may
be one, maybe some of the database interfaces too. Maybe RQuantLib just
because it is huge.

Dirk

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