[R-sig-Debian] arm64 r-base backports on CRAN

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Johannes,

( And sorry about the fat-finger typo in the earlier email butchering your
name. I really need to get proof-reading emails before sending... )

On 24 June 2025 at 20:02, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
| On Tue, Jun 24, 2025 at 7:55 PM Johannes Ranke <johannes.ranke using jrwb.de> wrote:
| >
| > Hey Jeroen,
| >
| > I was recently considering to do this, but did not get around to buy hardware or look for hosting on that architecture.
| >
| > I just invested in a nice amd64 system, but just for building for CRAN I wont need too many arm64 cyles.
| >
| > Any recommendations on where to look?
| 
| GitHub actions has free arm64 and x86_64 runners. If you have the
| build scripts somewhere, we can try to run them on there. I think this
| is also where Dirk builds the arm64 ubuntu binary R packages.

Yes, I was about to suggest that too but Jeroen beat me to it. I looked
around, and noticed Hetzner has relatively inexpensive machines ... but at
the end of the day it is still your money out of your pocket.

I started to poke at arm64 when the (free) runner became available for
ubuntu-24.04 (and they since added ubuntu-22.04 too). I actually execute the
build-step in a (custom) Docker container (with added r2u resources) so you
should be able to use the Ubuntu runner to start a Debian container ... and
after that it is like running locally. Only umpteen times slower for
debugging cycles <wink>. I also switched to building the BioC binaries for
amd64 there.

My (fairly ad-hoc) repo is
  https://github.com/eddelbuettel/r2u-arm64-builder
and the action file is
  https://github.com/eddelbuettel/r2u-arm64-builder/blob/main/.github/workflows/arm64.yaml

I respect a remote invocation reflecting the packages to build in each run,
that will be easier for you as you know what to build.

Ping me if you have question. Direct DM may be best, you could hop into the
(open) r-contributors slack at r-contributors.slack.com

Cheers, Dirk

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