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

[Johannes Ranke]

Hi Dirk,

Am Dienstag, 24. Juni 2025, 20:20:42 CEST schrieb Dirk Eddelbuettel:
> Hi Johannes,
> 
> ( And sorry about the fat-finger typo in the earlier email butchering your
> name. 

No worries! Happens to the best of us - and to me as well :)

> 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 found a nice offer from my hosting provider. The arm64 backports of R 4.5.1 
to Debian 11 (bullseye) and 12 (bookworm) should hit the mirrors at midnight.

After my work, I snapshotted the server and deleted it to save resources. I 
believe I should be able to easily recover it when I get around to do the 
backports for trixie or the next R release comes up.

Cheers,

Johannes

> | > 
> | > 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/workflo
> ws/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