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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Robin,

On 28 March 2020 at 10:30, Robin Lovelace wrote:
| 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:

I wonder if we should provide these for "bionic" (18.04) and onwards as that
is (for a few more weeks) the reigning LTS.  Also, saying 19.04 here and
pointing to eoan sounds fishy. 19.04 is "disco" IIRC.

I also *strongly* recommend you bullet-proof this by starting from a plain
ubuntu:$VERSION container and test it.
 
| sudo -i
| echo 'deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu eoan-cran35/' | sudo
| tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

The cool kids all use a new file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ now look in
yours.  The you can just copy and/or shell redirect.

| sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys
| E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9

I never remember if apt-add-repository works with this too.

| 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.

And you could mention the Rutter PPA here -- another 4k binary packages!
 
| 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

We could/should also shout out to Fedora who now have a repo with all (!!) of
CRAN (!!) as per a recent email by Inaki "somewhere" (r-devel? r-pkg-devel?)

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

It's good. Sorry for not responding sooner. The raw Rmd was hard to read; I
tend to just push .md to GitHub (when I have R-code free writeups like this
which is almost all of them) as that is always rendered to read.

Dirk

| 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?
| 
| 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
| 
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http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org