On 10 July 2010 at 11:54, Ross Boylan wrote: | On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 16:41 +0200, Scotti Roberto wrote: | > stimulates a very basic question: "Is it possible to avoid building | > from | > source using R in Kubuntu? | > I shifted over from MS only recently. In Windows I used to easily | > download packages and use them. | > Now, every time I downloaded a new piece, I had the impression that | > building from source was necessary. | > Am I wrong? | > Many thanks Roberto | Generally, building from source is not necessary. I think the other | responses agreeing that it is necessary were assuming you were | interested in some slightly exotic R package (which may be the case). | | The point of most distributions is to provide pre-compiled binary | packages; particularly on Debian these are very good about indicating | what other packages they require. If you use a tool like aptitude and | tell it you want package X, it will automatically pull in all other | required packages. Ubuntu is a Debian derivative. | | Both R and many of its packages are in Debian. | | If you have a package that is not already built you can build it | yourself or use cran2deb (assuming it's on CRAN). As others have noted, | cran2deb is only intended for Debian testing (aka squeeze) on some | architectures. It's also currently a bit broken. You can try using the | archive in another environment (e.g., Ubuntu), but if you want something | that is not a gamble for R, running Debian testing (maybe in a VM) would | be the safest route. Of course, it's called testing rather than stable | for a reason. | | I think the cran2deb packages, which are generated automatically, are | less likely to have complete dependency information than those in the | main distribution.
Huh? If the info wasn't complete, they'd break. They don't break, so the info appears to complete. Please don't spread misinformation. D. | Finally, you expressed concern for your students. You can build a | binary package locally and then your students can use it. Doing so for | someone new to Linux is probably a heavy lift. | | Ross Boylan | | _______________________________________________ | R-SIG-Debian mailing list | [email protected] | https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian -- Regards, Dirk _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian
