R help - Mar 2004 - 1.8.1 on Debian stable

This has probably been addressed here, but I can't find it if it has, 
and it may be up on the R project homepage or the CRAN pages, but if 
so ....

... so sorry if this has been answered before: question is, can I 
upgrade to 1.8.1 under Debian stable (a.k.a. "Woody")?  The deb 
packages in the CRAN archive are clearly for 1.8.0 and those in the 
"unstable" distro for Debian are 1.8.1.  Therefore I assume there are 
dependency problems to solve that didn't make it worth making 1.8.1 
available for Woody and if the package maintainers don't want to try, 
I certainly won't attempt it.  But I am sorry as this seems to mean 
that I can't get the ROC package in Bioconductor for my machine.

(No: too many security reasons why I don't want to go to
"unstable"
on the machine in question.)

Thanks in advance for any advice, pointers or clarifications.

Chris
PSYCTC: Psychotherapy, Psychology, Psychiatry, Counselling
   and Therapeutic Communities; practice, research, 
   teaching and consultancy.
Chris Evans & Jo-anne Carlyle
http://psyctc.org/ Email: chris at psyctc.org

On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 11:03:07AM -0000, Chris Evans
wrote:
> This has probably been addressed here, but I can't find it if it has, 
> and it may be up on the R project homepage or the CRAN pages, but if 
> so ....
> 
> ... so sorry if this has been answered before: question is, can I 
> upgrade to 1.8.1 under Debian stable (a.k.a. "Woody")?  The deb 
> packages in the CRAN archive are clearly for 1.8.0 and those in the 
> "unstable" distro for Debian are 1.8.1.  Therefore I assume there
are
The CRAN backports are contributed by volunteers. If nobody contributed such
a package, and you cannot use testing [1], you are left with compiling it
yourself.
> dependency problems to solve that didn't make it worth making 1.8.1 
> available for Woody and if the package maintainers don't want to try, 
I think you misunderstand what 'stable' means: No new packages. 

Hth, Dirk 

[1] You should really add testing to your /etc/apt/sources.list and give it
a default 'pin' of -1 so that it would never install from it -- unless
you
ask for it explicitly.  Then say 'apt-get -t testing install r-base' and
it
will install r-base from testing, i.e. 1.8.1, with just its required
libraries, leaving the rest of your system alone. As libraries are properly
versioned, this is generally safe, and a trick that has been used by many,
many users.

-- 
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