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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 3 May 2018 at 13:21, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
| 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.

c2d4u3.5 looks great! But for Travis we will also need trusty aka 14.04 :-/
 
| > 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.

Maybe the interfaces to the package systems can help: ie update.packages()
has 'checkbuilt' option may be useful.  On the Linux side I added a few
queries to the RcppAPT package, so it can tell you which packages depend on
older R versions like 3.4.* (or older).  

Dirk

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