[R-sig-Debian] Is r2u at 3.4.1?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for posting here, and sorry I missed it for two days due to sorting
mailing list traffic into folders and clearly not glancing at all of them.

On 13 August 2023 at 09:12, Chris Evans wrote:
| I am putting this here as it may be of general and not just my own 
| interest.  I am currently running 4.3.1 on Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS but am 
| hitting an issue that the magick package won't update because 
| libmagick++-dev won't update because, presumably, of two repositories in 
| my sources.list disagreeing about versions required.  That's not so

That can happen, and pinning can help. I would suggest to look at 'apt-cache
polict nameofthepackagehere'. (See below for concrete example.)

(Also: how come there are two libmagick++-dev, ie why do you have a 2nd one,
ie do you know which additional repo you turned on?)

| urgent an issue for me that I wont just wait to see if it sorts itself 
| out.  In my experience such collisions sometimes do.
| 
| However, it prompted me to some questions:
| 
| 1) Is this telling me it's time I went to r2u which does seem a "very 
| good thing"?  Any reason NOT to change?

Hm, I don't exactly follow.

r2u is a good thing. I use it more and more, so do others. Traffic is up, and
we get more and more use cases. Works really well on 22.04 LTS and later. (I
happen to run 23.04 now.)

But r2u cannot prevent you from encountering _other conflicts from other
repos_ as you may have here with magick++. (It may of course reduce the need
for other repos, and that would help.)
 
| 2) I read https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r2u/, not for the first time, 
| and it looks simple, even I should  be able to do that.  Any gotchas?  
| See #3:
| 
| 3) but it says things I don't really understand about the R version:
|     "Current versions are based on R 4.3.0, and BioConductor release 
| 3.17 packages are provided when required by CRAN packages. Binaries are 
| still R 4.2.* based (unless a forced rebuild was required) but the 
| containers provide R 4.3.0. We expect to switch to R 4.3.0-based builds 
| very soon."

That sounds like an old paragraph I should update. We are now at R 4.3.1, of
course, and BioConductor 3.17 (released right after R 4.3.0). The next
sentence is from the 4.2 -> 4.3 transition, r2u has looong switched to 4.3
generation too so I will delete this.

Thanks for the heads-up.
 
|     3a) I don't understand why "binaries", presumably binary packages, 
| would be at a different release from ... what?  What is not binary?  
| Pure R source packages?

R binaries from CRAN per the usual README at
   https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/
which we pointed to for what must be well over 10 years. (That README still
only talks c2d4u, which is of course still up and well, but may be time to
add a link to r2u too.)

|     3b) _IS_ it still at 4.3.0 as I'm at 3.4.1 and would be a bit 
| reluctant to go backwards down the release sequence?

No nothing is at R 4.3.0.

You can always check but adding the apt entry to your sources.list file and
doing 'apt-cache policy r-base-core' to see which package version is / would
be pulled it.

| TIA and enormous respect to Dirk for this and all the other work he does 
| for R,

Thanks for those very kinds words. Now please help me to make the READMEs
clearer. I will start by nixing the obsolete sentence you alerted me to, so
thans for that.

Cheers, Dirk

| Visiting Professor, UDLA, Quito, Ecuador & Honorary Professor, 
| University of Roehampton, London, UK.

Nice. I got to workshop-keynote once in Guayaquil and regret not making over
to Quito.

-- 
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org