[R-sig-Debian] installation problem for R 4.0 on Debian buster

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 5 June 2020 at 00:31, Mark van der Loo wrote:
| Hi all,
| 
| I just spun up a fresh Debian Buster instance, then I added:
| 
| deb http://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian buster-cran40/
| 
| to /etc/apt/sources.list. I also ran the apt-key command as described here:
| https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian/#secure-apt
| 
| So far so good, now when I do the following, I get no joy:
| 
| $ sudo apt-get install r-base
| 
| Reading package lists... Done
| Building dependency tree
| Reading state information... Done
| Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
| requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
| distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
| or been moved out of Incoming.
| The following information may help to resolve the situation:
| 
| The following packages have unmet dependencies:
|  r-base : Depends: r-recommended (= 4.0.0-1~bustercran.0) but it is not
| going to be installed
| E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
| 
| 
| However, when I use the buster-cran-35 deb line, all works fine. So there
| seems to be something going on with buster-cran-40. Is this correct, or am
| I missing something?

You run one command to install r-base. It tells that it wants to (but can't)
install r-recommended.

To have the system tell you more and why, add r-recommended:

  $ sudo apt-get install r-base r-recommended

Keep adding packages while it complains. After maybe five or so steps you
should. It is often because _one_ of the libraries brought in by the 'new'
package conflict. That can happen with backports.  (And it is one of the
reasons I like 'testing' better but hey personal tastes and preferences
cannot be debated...)

Dirk

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