[R-sig-Fedora] Plans for R 4.1 in Fedora?

[Iñaki Ucar]

On Wed, 23 Jun 2021 at 18:29, Gavin Simpson <ucfagls using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks Iñaki! toolbox looks really useful for my usecase.

Toolbox is *very* cool. :)

> I'm hitting a related issue in that some R-* packages are not up-to-date with their CRAN versions (especially testthat, which won't compile on F35/rawhide because of a problem in catch that is bundled with testhat and something that has changed in the compiler versions in rawhide. So now I'm still stuck as I can't install the latest version of vdiffr (which I need for R 4.1) as it needs 3.0.3 of testthat.

Currently, in rawhide, I recommend installing R-testthat, which comes
from the official repos, and it's patched. Also, please make some
noise in [1] to get it resolved upstream. ;-)

[1] https://github.com/r-lib/testthat/issues/1373

> I'm also a little unclear why there are so many R-* packages in the repos now? And how these relate to your COPR-based initiative to provide fedora packages for all of CRAN.

All the R-* packages are in the official repos, most of them
maintained by Elliott (@qulogic). There are a few hundred. Then, if
you have my Copr enabled, you'll have access to R-CRAN-* packages,
which currently are more than 17100 packages. CRAN packages in the
official repos are also in the Copr repo (R-testthat is the official
one; R-CRAN-testthat comes from Copr). These installations are
compatible, because the Copr repo installs stuff into /usr/local to
avoid any clashes with the official repos. The official repos also
have some Bioc packages not present in my Copr repo. See [2] for
further details.

[2] https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/fedora/

If you happen to have the same package from several sources, R will
pick your user library as a first option, packages from Copr as the
second option, and packages from the official repos as the third
option.

> I suspect I'm hitting all the issues that Tom and you and others are having to deal with in the course of your packaging R packages for fedora, but as until recently I just compiled R myself I'm a little unsure what is the best/recommended strategy for installing R packages etc on Fedora? Use the main repo packages, your COPR, something else? Is there an overview, road map or plan somewhere that outlines this and/or what the recommended route is?

What can I say? :) The Copr repo has been working nicely for me,
especially for stable releases. I have it enabled in all the servers I
manage here at the university. And it's especially convenient when you
install the R-CoprManager package, because then you just call
install.packages() in your R console and binary packages from Copr are
automatically installed if they are available; otherwise, they are
pulled from CRAN, so no big deal.

In rawhide, there may be some "glitches", because it's in active
development, so I have to launch several mass rebuilds until things
start to settle (no more system-wide changes, no more core library
updates...). Right now I'm in the middle of a mass rebuild, so you
won't be able to install some packages until it's finished.

-- 
Iñaki Úcar