Hi Robin, Thanks for asking here rather than on Twitter. I am old-school and think this is a better place / more searchable / more easy to expand.
On 2 May 2018 at 09:35, Robin Lovelace wrote: | I'd be interested to hear views on how and when Ubuntu users should upgrade | to R 3.5.0. | | I made the upgrade a few days ago but reverted because of issues installing | packages such as rJava, which I installed on the system with r-cran-rjava. | | Also any advice on how to do a clean uninstall of the previous version | before making the leap greatly appreciated. I guess it all depends. You really need to ensure you have no old r-cran-* packages with binary code left as that code would not load. So if in doubt, don't upgrade. Check your system, do 'dpkg -l | grep r-cran' (and/or r-bioc). Use 'apt cache policy r-cran-abc' to check on a (hypothetical) package abc. (We have RcppAPT to query apt from R too.) For Ubuntu, we opted for some flexibility by NOT imposing the r-api-3* tags. If you want, and know what you are doing, you _can_ upgrade now, use what is available as binaries (r-recommended plus some more) and then complement with local installation into /usr/local/lib/R/site-packages to complete your system. It is what I do as I tend to install a lot from CRAN directly. For Debian, we do not have that option. An upgrade will only be available once everything has been rebuilt for r-api-3.5, or else all old packages will get uninstalled -- which may not be what one wants. I would be happy to hear what others think. Jeroen already voiced his support for also making Ubuntu 'harder' to upgrade by adding the tag. I am still on the fence on that -- to me, having the flexibility seems worth the risk of shooting one's foot off -- but I may be in the minority. As a start, we can probably collect the names of a few 'harder to install' packages that should go to the new repo sooner rather than later. rJava may be one, maybe some of the database interfaces too. Maybe RQuantLib just because it is huge. Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list R-SIG-Debian@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian