Dirk Eddelbuettel
2022-May-10 11:34 UTC
[R-sig-Debian] New repo 'CRANapt' with 19k packages for Ubuntu 20.04 + 22.04
Two tweets last week [1] announced something I have worked on for the last few weeks: CRANapt. Documentation is at https://eddelbuettel.github.io/r2u/ It covers all of CRAN (minus three packages blacklisted for lack of build dependencies [2], and about three that do build for other reasons) so just under 19k packages each [3] along with about 180 packages from BioConductor. It all works quite well and fast. The tweets, and docs site, show two recorded gifs showing installation of ALL required r-cran-* packages for, respectively, tidyverse and brms in 18 and 13 seconds each (!!). Better still, this uses bspm so we bridge from install.packages() to apt use and have FULL system integration. Everything has been built for R 4.2.0, and the BioConductor packages use 3.15 so we are current. Give it a spin -- there are setup instructions, short setup scripts, Docker containers and a GitPod integration meaning that if you are on GitHub and are / or can sign up to GitPod.io you get to run a session (off the Docker container) in your browser (!!) which is neat (up to 50h / months for free). Please ask questions here (on list) or as issues at the GitHub repo. This is not (yet at least) meant to replace cran2deb4ubuntu. Many of us rely on it (for our systems, and/or CI) as it is built on solid infrastructure we can rely on (the Launchpad system by Canonical) and uses the official formal build process which is good and time-tested. However, as two friends had built 'full' coverage for OpenSUSE and Fedora, respectively, I also wanted to give this another try [4] with a lighter-weight build approach to see if I could move coverage beyond its 5k package. Which worked so here we are. (On a system running it you can keep cran2deb4ubuntu entries, or replace them as CRANapt has a superset of packages. Please do add a pinning file as a handful of packages in the distro have an (accidentally) higher version number (from adding '+dfsg' and alike). Cheers, Dirk [1] https://twitter.com/eddelbuettel/status/1522731846831902721 and https://twitter.com/eddelbuettel/status/1523376755548979201 [2] ROracle and Rcplex need commercial software, BRugs needs a binary [3] CRAN has been pruning since hitting 19k in March and is now at 18.7. I have yet to add a script to remove CRAN-removed packages from CRANapt. [4] I have been on and off on this since the 2000s building initally on Albrecht Gebhardt's work, then another iniative, plus brilliant GSoC work I mentored and extended for a bit (til a machine crash took it out); Don Armstrong had a full system too (til a crash a fully-RAIDed system took it out) and so on. -- dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org