[R-sig-Debian] Advice on article about installing R on Linux

[Robin Lovelace]

Dear list,

I've drafted an article on installing geographic R packages on Linux
computers and would appreciate any feedback. Is the following text correct,
useful and future-proof?:

R’s spatial packages can be installed from source on recent (since Ubuntu
19.04) versions of this popular operating system, once the appropriate
repository has been set-up, meaning faster install times (only a few
minutes including the installation of upstream dependencies). The following
bash commands should install key geographic R packages on Ubuntu 19.04,
19.10 or 20.04:

sudo -i
echo 'deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu eoan-cran35/' | sudo
tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys
E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9
sudo apt update
sudo apt install r-base-dev r-cran-sf r-cran-raster r-cran-tmap

If you are using an older version of Ubuntu and don’t want to upgrade to
the next Long Term Support release (20.04), see instructions at
github.com/r-spatial/sf.

3. Other operating systems
If you are in the fortunate position of switching to Linux and being able
to choose the distribution that best fits your needs, it’s worth thinking
about which distribution will be both user-friendly (more on that soon),
performant and future-proof. Ubuntu is a solid choice, with a large user
community and repositories such as ‘ubuntugis’ providing more up-to-date
versions of upstream geographic libraries such as GDAL.

QGIS is also well-supported on on Ubuntu.

However, you can install R and key geographic packages on other operating
systems, although it may take longer. Useful links on installing R and
geographic libraries are provided below for reference:

Installing R on Debian is covered on the CRAN website. Upstream
dependencies such as GDAL can be installed on recent versions of Debian,
such as buster, with commands such as apt-get install libgdal-dev as per
instructions on the rocker/geospatial.

Full article here:
https://github.com/geocompr/geocompr.github.io/blob/installing-on-linux/content/post/2020/installing-r-spatial-packages-linux.Rmd

Planning to publish this on Monday, thanks in advance for any feedback.

Robin

P.s. I noticed in the process of writing this that eoan instructions are
missing here:

https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README.html

Worth updating them?

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