On Tue, 29 Sep 2009, Troy Dawson wrote:

<snip>
> Hi Eva,
> I bet it stems from us having a epoch of 2 in our version of R.
> That stems back from the first time we compiled R, I didn't see that we had 
> an epoch of 2.  I didn't notice that we had the epoch until I was reading the 
> spec file from Fedora or EPEL, which has the epoch in, with a note saying 
> they had to do it because Scientific Linux had it. Once you have an epoch, 
> it's almost impossible to get it out.
>
> But how to fix your problem?
> You need to exclude R that is coming from Scientific Linux.  That's not too 
> hard.  You need to add the following at the end of /etc/yum.repos.d/sl.repo 
> and /etc/yum.repos.d/sl-security.repo
>
> exclude=R R-devel libRmath libRmath-devel
>
> That should keep it from trying to install Scientific Linux's R.

I have a horrible feeling that the epoch=2 evil might well be my fault. 
The changelog in the sl53 (R-2.8.1) specfile contains:

  * Fri Feb 08 2008 Jon Peatfield <[log in to unmask]> - 2:2.6.2-1
  - Update to 2.6.2 tweaks to build on SL5x (and add DAMTP evil hacks in
    a slightly cleaner way).  Include fix from SL5x 2.5.0-2 srpm (zip
    must be a BuildRequires or it won't get listed in etc/Renviron when
    built in brewbuilder).  Epoch needs to be 2 for SL5x.
...

before that all the epoch numbers mentioned seem to be 1...

If I did cause this mess then I'm sorry for all the trouble is has caused.

In any case I wonder it it would be worth us asking (nicely) if the CRAN 
people would set epoch=2 on their rhel5 rpm builds since otherwise anyone 
using EPEL on RHEL/SL/CENTOS will be unable to directly use the CRAN 
version...

-- 
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| Jon Peatfield, _Computer_ Officer, DAMTP,  University of Cambridge |
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