[R-sig-Debian] pinning of binary r-cran-* packages from c2d4u / r2u on Ubuntu 22.04

[Thomas Petzoldt]

Hi,

I am running a couple of shiny servers with several apps that are based 
around own CRAN packages. It worked stable for years, but due to the 
growing number of packages, the compile time for regular manual package 
installation and updates became inconvenient.

Therefore, I have been very happy to use pre-compiled packages from the 
c2d4u repository  -- and from now on testing r2u following a hint from 
Dirk Edelbuettel. @Dirk: installation worked like a charm.

The downside is, that the r-cran-* binaries are being installed 
automatically, together with the system update. So experienced repeated 
cases that crashed some of the shiny apps. The main reason with c2d4u 
were conflicts between the binary packages and other packages installed 
from sources. This may be less relevant with r2u, but in the interest of 
reproducibility and stability, I would prefer conservative manual updates.

My question: what is best practise, to disallow automatic updates for 
all (or part of) r-cran-* packages? Uncommenting the complete package 
source in the apt/sources.list.d/cd4u...list file? Fiddling around with 
/etc/apt/preferences ?

The ideal approach would be to put a plain textfile of all installed 
r-cran packages somewhere to the system, where packages that are to be 
upgraded (or oppositely: pinned) are just commented or outcommented.

Thanks in advance,

Thomas


Links:

https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/c2d4u.team/c2d4u4.0+/ubuntu/

https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r2u