[R-sig-Debian] Installing Rstudio and shiny free server on Debian

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Chris,

I fear you may be overcomplicating things.  RStudio tends to just work; the
.deb files are also large and "mostly self-contained" -- so that generally
only require one or two other packages you should find without trouble.  Of
course I cannot fully speak to your experience as I do not run Debian stable
(mostly current Debian (ie "testing") or Ubuntu (ie now 18.10) for me), as
well as Docker rather than VMs.

The README at the RStudio site also tends to cover what you need. And no, I
don't think I know a single person who'd recommend compiling from source.

So I would say just try it and if something comes up come back here, and we
will try to help. Lastly, recall that installations of packages should be
fully reversible (unless you do unspeakable things).  So if for whatever
reason the .deb does not install, no harm done.

Dirk

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