I think I suck at email because I (thought I) answered this question in
this thread and yet I do not see my message in the new gmail display.  So,
in case you did not get this, here it is.

It is easy to build your own RPM for your system. I don't want to
discourage your from updating, but it would not be hard at all. (I wrote
out how a couple of years ago. http://pj.freefaculty.org/blog/?p=73. This
is the old style way, but I'm old)

I have a Fedora 17 virtual machine, but only in 32 bit.  I'm trying this
now.  R does not rely on cutting edge software, I'll be stunned if I can't
build it in Fedora 17.  F17 is still newer than EL6 in most things, after
all.

This is an old VM, I did not start it for at least 6 months. Not completely
up to date.  The first attempt to rebuild R fails, it needs RPMs for
libSM-devel, libICE-devel, libjpeg-devel, libpango-devel, libicu-devel, and
about 20 others.  I was little worried this will necessitate a complete
update.

No, OK.  I ran into a little wrinkle that it found an old version of the R
package "compiler" and tried to use that, but after removing R, I got a
clean build. Evidence:

http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R

 R-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/R-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:58   18K
 R-3.0.1-2.fc17.src.rpm
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/R-3.0.1-2.fc17.src.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:59   24M
 R-core-3.0.1-2.fc17...>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/R-core-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:59   52M
 R-core-devel-3.0.1-2..>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/R-core-devel-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:59   91K
 R-devel-3.0.1-2.fc17..>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/R-devel-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:59   17K
 R-java-3.0.1-2.fc17...>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/R-java-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:59   18K
 R-java-devel-3.0.1-2..>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/R-java-devel-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:59   18K
 libRmath-3.0.1-2.fc1..>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/libRmath-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:58  244K
 libRmath-devel-3.0.1..>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/libRmath-devel-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:58   23K
 libRmath-static-3.0...>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/libRmath-static-3.0.1-2.fc17.i386.rpm>
06-Aug-2013 15:58  127K



There's one long-ish patch of almost build, then it fails because it finds
the old copy of R's compile. After removing old R, all good. But at the end
you see the RPM pop out.

It runs, I installed it. I can't say for sure if any functionality was
omitted because this particular vm lacked some other devel package. But it
proves a point. I guess you can tell if you look at the build output. I did
most of this work in an Emacs eshell, you can see errors and failures.

http://pj.freefaculty.org/Fedora/17/i386/R/shell-20130806.txt

The 64bit version is left as an exercise for the reader :) Or somebody else
who has a virtual machine for that. Or somebody who wants to incentivize me.

Although I changed to other linux systems, I still like RPM. The RPM system
is a very well thought out thing. And I marvel once again at the autoconf
magic of the R Core Team.  I've never had patience to learn that, but I
admire people who have.
pj


On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 9:16 AM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 08/02/2013 06:01 AM, Rolf Turner wrote:
> >
> >
> > I am currently (still) running Fedora 17 --- having not managed to screw
> > my courage to the sticking place and upgrade.
> > Even though we are now up to Fedora 20, I think. The traffic on the
> > Fedora mailing list on the upgrading issue is a bit terrifying.
> >
> > I would just like to confirm that:
> >
> >     It is ***NOT*** possible to download a binary of R for  Fedora 17.
> >
> > Is this correct?
> >
> > My efforts to obtain a binary using yum install resulted in a binary for
> > version 2.15.2.  (Whereas of course the source version available from
> > CRAN is 3.0.1.
> >
> > I just wanted to check that I am not doing something stupid (like maybe
> > using an incorrect repository).
>
> Nope, this is right. F17 just end-of-lifed, so I never did a 3.0.1 build
> for it (because it would also mean I had to rebuild every other R
> package in the Fedora 17 tree).
>
> Apologies for the inconvenience,
>
> ~tom
>
> ==
> Fedora Project
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Fedora mailing list
> R-SIG-Fedora@r-project.org
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora
>



-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science      Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504      Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas                 University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org               http://quant.ku.edu

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