[R] Where has the Debian respository gone?

[Chris Evans]

Hello Dirk,

Thursday, November 18, 2004, 3:18:40 PM, you wrote:

DE> On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 08:52:38AM +0000, stats wrote:
>> I'm a bit puzzled.  I had
>>         deb http://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian woody main
>> in /etc/apt/sources.list and had hoped, perhaps rather unwisely, that
>> this would look after the transition from 1.8.0 on my internet server (Debian
>> stable) where it serves up some cgi-bin work.  (Most of my R work is
>> on a Win2k machine, much though I'd like to go Debian all the way,
>> that isn't possible for my main job in near future.)
>> 
>> Is there an easy way of upgrading R on a Debian stable machine?  I
>> don't want to move off stable as the security side of that server is
>> too important.  I also don't really want to compile it myself if I can
>> avoid that, the server is pretty old iron and that might back up all
>> the Email stuff it does.
>> 
>> Advice anyone?

DE> More than advice, we need a volunteer to "backport" the current R package(s)
DE> for Debian to the Debian stable distribution. As I said, testing and
DE> unstable are taken care of (and yes, testing is still lagging because of the
DE> now much more formal interdependence of packages; R 2.0.* will appears once
DE> all dependent packages are available on all architectures)

I'm sure this is in itself proof that I'm not the person to do it but
can you say a bit more about what's involved Dirk?  I run a pretty low
powered Debian stable server on i386 hardware (an athlon if I remember
rightly) with pretty much the standard packages, GCC, perl etc. and I'm
not completely stupid.  However, debugging compiler and make complaints
is really not my area of competence and I do wonder about the likely load
on the machine and on my time.

In the not too distant future this machine should be replaced with a
much more powerful one and a somewhat more powerful backup machine so
hardware may not be a long term problem.

Any chance I can be useful?  Could I team up with someone who really
knows what s/he is doing but doesn't use Debian stable and work this
together?

Let me know, I'd love to put something very direct back into the R project.

Chris