Are there some non-obvious reasons not to have ports for R packages? Or just no one felt like making any?
R basically uses a mechanism akin to Python, OCaml or Perl, installing stuff into its “mini-prefix”. While we do have ports for the latter three (not many for OCaml), there are none for R. FreeBSD at the same time does have ports for select R packages. Why bother? 1. Some packages are broken for old systems (including Intel), but can be trivially fixed with patches. Those include some basic packages, like fs and xml2. 2. In a number of cases all that is needed is legacysupport PG. 3. With a fancy complicated packages we may prefer using existing dependencies rather than building supplied – usually outdated – duplicate copies. (At least for testing/development.) What do you think?
