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

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 10:35 AM, Robin Lovelace <rob00x at gmail.com> 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.

My strategy will be to jump to R 3.5 when I upgrade my servers to
Ubuntu Bionic in a few weeks (will probably do a clean install).
Currently c2d4u has pretty great coverage of CRAN binaries for Xenial
(and Trusty) so I will stick with Xenial + R 3.4 for now.

>From activity on launchpad it looks like c2d4u-3.5 is currently
focussing on Ubuntu Bionic, which is great because that will give us a
clean path forward. Hopefully in a few weeks from now, most r-cran
packages will be there so we can upgrade to Bionic and R3.5 at the
same time.

> Also any advice on how to do a clean uninstall of the previous version
> before making the leap greatly appreciated.

Due to the missing api tags, I think it will be very difficult to
automatically determine which r-cran packages you can keep. If you
really need to upgrade you probably want to purge r-cran-* and
r-base-* and reinstall from the new ppa.