[R-sig-Debian] Installing R 3.5 on Ubuntu bionic stopped(?) working

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Tim,

On 22 November 2019 at 12:03, Tim Head wrote:
| One language we support is R. We let people choose which version they need
| and because we are based on Ubuntu we use the packages provided on
| https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README.html to install R 3.5
| and 3.6 (R 3.4 comes as part of Ubuntu bionic).

Hm, I will be frank. I am a little surprised that ever worked. We offer

- in each distro release exactly one version.  So R 3.4.* from bionic.

- by opting into add-on repos like the CRAN one, or c2d4u, or ...  additional
  ones _but generally only exactly one current version_.  So R 3.6.1 now.

We (as providers of these repos) never promised other interim version.
 
| With repo2docker we are in a slightly weird position where we want to
| enable container image builds that worked 6months or 12months ago to also
| work today. This means if a user built a container with R 3.5 in the past

You could maybe base that on the versioned Rocker container (the "r-ver"
stack) which is also tagged to corresponding dates at MRAN.  No support for
binary packages though.

Somewhat simpler but without MRAN tagging are r-base releases. These should
still be at hub.docker.com:

edd using rob:~$ docker images | grep ^r-base
r-base                       3.6.1               4e55790c88ae        4 months ago        642MB
r-base                       latest              4e55790c88ae        4 months ago        642MB
r-base                       3.6.0               6dfc0dec6d66        6 months ago        662MB
r-base                       3.5.3               62c848eeb175        8 months ago        649MB
r-base                       3.5.2               578644a0540c        10 months ago       650MB
r-base                       3.5.1               93ca38345db2        16 months ago       678MB
r-base                       3.5.0               fb43e8fe1667        17 months ago       698MB
r-base                       3.4.3               d1e1c25485af        20 months ago       670MB
r-base                       3.4.2               02d3b7e00020        2 years ago         651MB
r-base                       3.4.0               5a6c58403310        2 years ago         656MB
r-base                       3.3.3               88436550cddc        2 years ago         635MB
r-base                       3.3.1               7ba1baf9d8bb        3 years ago         657MB
edd using rob:~$ 

Dirk

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