[Rd] Why not in Debian distro?

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

[ Sorry for chiming in late, but was off email when this thread started ] 

  "Tony" == A J Rossini <rossini@blindglobe.net> writes:
  Peter> "Peter" == Peter Dalgaard <BSA <p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk>> writes:
  Peter> later. Whatever happened to the internal Debian discussions on
  Peter> creating a faster upgrade path for applications?

That is not the real problem. The real problem is (soon, hopefully: was) the
dependency on Atlas in Debian's r-base package, and the lack of Atlas libs
for architectures beyond i386, alpha and sparc. Because of the this, the last
pre-Atlas-as-default remained in the released distribution (aka "stable") as
release are required to contain the same package set across architectures.

However, the Atlas maintainer has a new scheme of defaulting to the blas
library.  Where atlas exists and is installed, it will automagically be used
instead. This way, no architectures should be held back (as blas exists on
almost all) but the main archs can still reap the benefit of fast blas
operations.

  Tony>  They created Woody/testing, which is a broken nightmare.

I could not disagree more. I am running testing on systems at home and work,
and am very, very pleased with it. I prefer this over unstable (where real
blowups occurred in the last few months). And I typically upgrade daily.

  Timothy> face after an apt-get.  Debian has a bad case of SADD (stable
  Timothy> attention deficit disorder).  None of the developers care much
  Timothy> about updating stable.  Its too much fun crashing unstable.  I

Blah. We have over 6000 packages, at least 13 architectures [1] and two
releases to support (as security backports are of course done).  And on top
of that you suggest we backport every package from unstable to stable?

As I said above, the situation with r-base is hopefully going to improve
soon. In the meantime, R packages are available from CRAN, including current
one compiled for "stable"

Dirk


[1] alpha, arm, hppa, hurd-i386, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc,
s390, sh, sparc


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