[R-sig-Debian] missing newer elpa-ess 24.01.1-5 package for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 20 May 2026 at 14:45, Andrew Piskorski wrote:
| My machine running Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS uses the cloud.r-project.org
| repository, as described in the instructions here:
| 
|   https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/
| 
| That recently upgraded my r-base-core, which UNINSTALLED elpa-ess.
| That's because the only available elpa-ess is version 24.01.1-1, which
| r-base-core says is too old, via the "Breaks:" line shown below.

Package maintainer here. That was because the elpa-ess package in its wisdom
decided to use what is known as 'autopkgtest', those failed, and it is
blocking passage of r-base from unstable to testing.

| Is there a plan to make the newer elpa-ess available via the same
| noble-cran40 repository r-base-core is coming from?  If not, is there
| somewhere else we should get it from?

Former ess package maintainer here: I just gave up on it as upstream made no
releases for years, and use elpa/melpa/... directly. I also orphaned the
package within Debian.  For a while we had another maintainer of ess /
elpa-ess in Debian but it looks like he stopped too.

Hth, Dirk

| Currently, it looks like the official Ubuntu repositories have the
| newer elpa-ess 24.01.1-5 available for Ubuntu 26.04 (resolute), but
| only the older 24.01.1-1 is available for Ubuntu 24.04.4 (noble).
| We can see that here:
| 
|   https://pkgs.org/search/?q=elpa-ess&on=name
|   https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ess
| 
| My current workaround is simply to install ESS v25.01.0 from the
| Github source.  (v26.01.0 doesn't seem to be tagged in Git.)
| Fortunately this isn't hard, and so far seems to work fine:
| 
|   https://ess.r-project.org/index.php?Section=download
|   https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS
| 
| 
| Output from my machine:
| --------------------------------------------------
| $ apt show r-base-core | egrep '^(Package|Version|Breaks):'
| Package: r-base-core
| Version: 4.6.0-4.2404.0
| Breaks: elpa-ess (<< 24.01.1-5~), r-cran-gsl (<< 2.1-8-1+b1~), r-cran-rlang (<< 1.1.5-3~)
| 
| $ apt show elpa-ess | egrep '^(Package|Version|Breaks):'
| Package: elpa-ess
| Version: 24.01.1-1
| 
| $ grep DESCRIPTION /etc/lsb-release 
| DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS"
| 
| $ grep '^deb' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/archive_uri-https_cloud_r-project_org_bin_linux_ubuntu-noble.list
| deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu noble-cran40/
| --------------------------------------------------
| 
| -- 
| Andrew Piskorski <atp using piskorski.com>
| 
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-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com

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