[R-sig-Debian] Ubuntu packages on s390x

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Vivian,

On 3 August 2023 at 19:15, Vivian Kong wrote:
| Are there any plans to add R packages for Ubuntu on other architectures in addition to amd64?  We are looking for s390x packages as the version from the distro's package manger is 4.2.2.  I'm happy to help in any way I can.

Ok, now I am a little confused why you as us volunteers here. Maybe
technically you should ask Canonical as the makers of Ubuntu of what they
plan to support?

We can look at the package r-base in Ubuntu (for which I am the maintainer
for Debian from where they take it)

   https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=r-base&searchon=sourcenames&suite=all&section=all

so it of course exists in the versions current when _the release was cut_ ie

   3.6.3-2 for focal (20.04, LTS)
   4.1.2-1 for jammy (22.04, LTS)
   4.2.1-3 for kinetic (22.10)
   4.2.2.20221110-2 for lunar (23.04, affected by the Debian freeze_
   4.3.1-4 for mantic (next release 23.10)

That is what Canonical does. End of story.

Now there are volunteers. Michael for Ubuntu, Detlef for SuSE, Inaki for
Fedora, ... who do what they to provide backports, mirrored at CRAN.

Michael uses launchpad.net to build these, Detlef uses the OBS build system
provided by SuSE (which we could use for other distros), Inaki uses a thing
by Fedora.

If you or your team at IBM Canada wanted to contribute builds, I (and with
the caveat that I am not official in any capacity and what I say now means
nothing besides putting some words into an email) think you could just do:

  - git clone the public repo
  - maintain whatever local patches
  - build them and keep them current
  - provide these builds to the world at large via whatever hosting you have

In essence that is what _I_ do in yet another volunteer initiative of mine,
namely by provide 20+ thousand CRAN packages each as r-cran-* (plus several
hundred r-bioc-*) via my r2u project (see https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r2u)
for both Ubuntu 20.04 (focal) and 22.04 (jammy).

But despite me mentioning this to CRAN a few times (and I will add another
BCC now just in case) nobody has bothered to reply to me when I asked if this
could possibly be mirrored via CRAN. Now, with some luck, and my adjunct
position and some connection to lovely tech support folks, I get to use a U
of Illinois VM to host this on Internet2 at r2u.stat.illinois.edu so we
happily served a few million downloads in 16 or so months (and currently save
well over 10k each day). You could start something similar.

Hope this helps. Happy to chat if you other questions. I do wear an official
hat as an R Foundation Board member but I can never speak for CRAN or other
official resources.

Best,  Dirk


| Thank you.
| 
| Regards,
| 
| Vivian Kong
| Linux on IBM Z Open Source Ecosystem
| IBM Canada Toronto Lab
| 
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