Many thanks Dirk, kind-of makes sense and I think my 'hold your horses' attitude is probably safest for now.
Two follow-up questions: - Roughly how long will it be until "everything has been rebuilt"? - Could this seemingly new project help manage external deps: https://github.com/r-hub/sysreqsdb ? On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 1:23 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> wrote: > > 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 > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list R-SIG-Debian@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian