[R-sig-Debian] New repo 'CRANapt' with 19k packages for Ubuntu 20.04 + 22.04

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Two tweets last week [1] announced something I have worked on for the last
few weeks: CRANapt.  Documentation is at https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r2u/

It covers all of CRAN (minus three packages blacklisted for lack of build
dependencies [2], and about three that do build for other reasons) so just
under 19k packages each [3] along with about 180 packages from BioConductor.

It all works quite well and fast. The tweets, and docs site, show two
recorded gifs showing installation of ALL required r-cran-* packages for,
respectively, tidyverse and brms in 18 and 13 seconds each (!!).  Better
still, this uses bspm so we bridge from install.packages() to apt use and
have FULL system integration.

Everything has been built for R 4.2.0, and the BioConductor packages use 3.15
so we are current.

Give it a spin -- there are setup instructions, short setup scripts, Docker
containers and a GitPod integration meaning that if you are on GitHub and are
/ or can sign up to GitPod.io you get to run a session (off the Docker
container) in your browser (!!) which is neat (up to 50h / months for free).
Please ask questions here (on list) or as issues at the GitHub repo.

This is not (yet at least) meant to replace cran2deb4ubuntu. Many of us rely
on it (for our systems, and/or CI) as it is built on solid infrastructure we
can rely on (the Launchpad system by Canonical) and uses the official formal
build process which is good and time-tested. However, as two friends had
built 'full' coverage for OpenSUSE and Fedora, respectively, I also wanted to
give this another try [4] with a lighter-weight build approach to see if I
could move coverage beyond its 5k package. Which worked so here we are. (On a
system running it you can keep cran2deb4ubuntu entries, or replace them as
CRANapt has a superset of packages. Please do add a pinning file as a handful
of packages in the distro have an (accidentally) higher version number (from
adding '+dfsg' and alike).
 
Cheers, Dirk


[1] https://twitter.com/eddelbuettel/status/1522731846831902721 and
    https://twitter.com/eddelbuettel/status/1523376755548979201
[2] ROracle and Rcplex need commercial software, BRugs needs a binary
[3] CRAN has been pruning since hitting 19k in March and is now at 18.7. I
    have yet to add a script to remove CRAN-removed packages from CRANapt.
[4] I have been on and off on this since the 2000s building initally on
    Albrecht Gebhardt's work, then another iniative, plus brilliant GSoC work
    I mentored and extended for a bit (til a machine crash took it out); Don
    Armstrong had a full system too (til a crash a fully-RAIDed system took
    it out) and so on.
    
-- 
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org