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

[Robin Lovelace]

Many thanks Dirk, kind-of makes sense and I think my 'hold your horses'
attitude is probably safest for now.

Two follow-up questions:


   - Roughly how long will it be until "everything has been rebuilt"?
   - Could this seemingly new project help manage external deps:
   https://github.com/r-hub/sysreqsdb ?


On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 1:23 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:

>
> 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
>

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