[R-sig-Debian] Ubuntu packages on s390x

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 9:16 PM Vivian Kong <vivkong using ca.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> 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.

You can easily do this for free using launchpad:

Create a launchpad repository (PPA), then go to "change settings", and
there you can select which architectures to build. By default only
amd64 is enabled, but you can enable any from the following:

 AMD x86-64 (amd64)
 ARM ARMv8 (arm64)
 ARM ARMv7 Hard Float (armhf)
 Intel x86 (i386)
 PowerPC (powerpc)
 PowerPC64 Little-Endian (ppc64el)
 IBM System z (s390x)

Now you just upload the r-base source packages to the PPA and they get
built for all these architectures. You can do this from the command
line, but you can even simply copy them from Michael Rutter's
backports ppa:

Go to https://launchpad.net/~marutter/+archive/ubuntu/rrutter4.0/ then
click "view package details" and then "copy packages". Select the
distro (e.g. jammy), then the r-base package and select "Rebuild the
copied sources" to r-base to your own PPA. That's it, it will
automatically build and publish the binaries.

I tested that this actually works here:
https://launchpad.net/~jeroen/+archive/ubuntu/r-backports . You can
see the repo has s390x binaries for r-4.3.1 and the page lists
installation instructions using apt.