[R-sig-Fedora] R-3.3.1 RPM release

[Tom Callaway]

Since I've gotten a few off-list replies, I feel like it's worth
pointing out why people are having trouble building R from source on
RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6.

R has always depended on some third party libraries, specifically,
zlib, bzip2, xz, pcre, and curl. Prior to R 3.3.0, R depended on much
older versions of these libraries, but, if they were not found on the
system, they'd use bundled copies that were built on the fly. With
3.3.0+, R now depends on much newer versions of these libraries and no
longer has bundled copies to fall back to.

This means that R 3.3.0+ won't build against RHEL/CentOS 5 or 6 as is,
because all of these libraries are too old on those releases of
RHEL/CentOS. (RHEL/CentOS 7 is new enough, as is all currently supported
releases of Fedora).

Realizing that there are a lot of R users in situations where the
distribution of Linux is out of their control (or who cannot upgrade to
RHEL/CentOS 7 for some reason), I spent a not small amount of time
figuring out how to build static copies of these libraries into R for
EL5/EL6 (and then even more time cleaning the evidence of this work out
of the internals so it didn't inherit into CRAN builds).

That said, you really should consider moving from EL5/6 to EL7. It's nice.

Builds of 3.3.1 are going through koji right now. EL5, EL6, and EL7 are
finished, Fedora 22-24 will be done shortly. Please test and give feedback:

EL5:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-fa43c0f5fa

EL6:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-6add114acf

EL7:
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-EPEL-2016-0f6db0c4e2

~tom

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Red Hat