Thanks for providing insight into how R users handle the installation of third party packages. It seems like our R package process is already excellent and according to industry standards, thanks a lot for the detailed explanation!
-Marco On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 10:56 AM Tong He <hetong...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Marco, > > There's no barrier on the technical side, as we can statically link > everything and ask Linux R users to download. > > The main reason that we (so far) do not offer the pre-built R package for > Linux users is simple: CRAN doesn't pre-build packages and R users are used > to it. > > Some further reasons: > On Windows and OS X, CRAN has its standard environment (compile with Xcode > and MinGW), but on Linux you just have so many options. Users may feel > confused if the pre-built package is configured differently from their > environment. > I am actually not awared of any R package offering a pre-built binary for > Linux, also R's `install.packages` doesn't seem to naturally support > installing binary on Linux (no chance to test yet). > > Another potential approach: > There are some R packages having the form as Linux packages. For example > the package `rgl` can be installed on ubuntu with `apt-get install > r-cran-rgl`: https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/math/r-cran-rgl . > People prefer to install in this way mainly to get rid of difficulties in > the dependencies, or in the environment configuration (e.g. for the package > `rJava` one needs to take care of $PATH and the permission of the > installation). > > > Best regards, > > Tong He > > 2018-07-04 1:20 GMT-07:00 Marco de Abreu < > marco.g.ab...@googlemail.com.invalid>: > > > Hi Anirudh, > > > > thanks for that explanation, that's definitely reasonable. Are we > > publishing it as part of the release process or are these independent > > efforts? I have noticed that we don't offer the pre-compiled version for > > download at > > http://mxnet.incubator.apache.org/install/index.html? > > platform=Linux&language=R&processor=CPU > > and thought that we might want to add a link so our users wouldn't have > to > > compile it themselves. > > > > Best regards, > > Marco > > > > On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 7:45 PM Anirudh Acharya <anirudhk...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > > > > Hi Marco, > > > > > > A release process for the R-package would probably involve publishing > the > > > package to CRAN. Currently it is not done and the r-package would need > > > considerable changes/improvements before it can get published to CRAN. > > > > > > So at present accessing the package from the S3 bucket is the surest > way > > to > > > access the R API. > > > > > > > > > Thanks > > > Anirudh > > > > > > > > > On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 2:48 AM Marco de Abreu > > > <marco.g.ab...@googlemail.com.invalid> wrote: > > > > > > > Hello, > > > > > > > > do we have a release process for our R frontend? I noticed the issue > at > > > [1] > > > > and it seems like we're only publishing to an S3 bucket which is not > > > under > > > > Apache. Is there another channel for our users to retrieve that > package > > > or > > > > is this our only supported official way? > > > > > > > > Best regards, > > > > Marco > > > > > > > > [1] https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/issues/10791 > > > > > > > > > >
