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

[Tim Head]

Hi,

thanks for the fast reply!

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 2:15 PM Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Ok. Sounds like we were making "off-label" use of the packages then. It was
good while it lasted ;)


>
> | 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.
>

The drawback of using rocker or other base images is that we currently have
the ability to compose several different ways of installing software (You
want R and Python? No problem!) which gets lost if we start using different
base images. Or at least we have to be careful about what base images we
use so that they all share Ubuntu bionic as the base.

As we are only after the R executables themselves maybe using conda to
install them or compiling from source is a way to explore.

Thanks!

T

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]