On Thu, 15 Nov 2007, Paul Johnson wrote: > I have a script that I run every night and it checks for a long list > of R packages and installs what is needed. On a new SL5 system, I > noticed that the script failed because the package "coda" was not > available. "There's a mistake" I thought to myself, because coda is > one of the heavily used packages for Bayesian MCMC modeling. > > It turned out that the CRAN current version of coda is set to ONLY > compile for R >= 2.5. Since the SL5 version of R is 2.4, the package > manager was not able to find the coda package. I updated R on the > system to the version that is available in Fedora and then the package > script worked fine. > > I understand the SL5 philosophy of preferring stable things, but since > R is one of the "feature packages" that differentiates Scientific > Linux from other RedHat EL descendants like CentOS, it seems important > to me that you should keep R more up to date than most packages. > > I went to the SL website to try to enter this opinion, but I find it > is necessary to log in and I can't find a place where I can register > myself. What's up with that? SL currently provides R-2.5 in the 'testing' repository, so something like: yum --enablerepo=sl-testing update R should pick up the newer version (and not pull in any other unrelated testing updates). I say *should* 'cos we upgraded to the 'testing' R some time ago so I can't trivially test that I got the yum options right. Apologies if I did. Troy sent a message to the list the other day saying that he plans to include an updated R in each new release of SL so SL51 will probably have something fairly recent by the time it is released. Troy Dawson <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I have thought of a plan for R. > The problem is that we have two sets of users. Those that want the > latest R and those that want the stable, this is what we use R. > > As each S.L. release comes out, we'll just check and see what the latest > R is, and put it in that release. > But we don't update the R in the older releases. So if a person wants to > sit on whatever R came with S.L. 4.5, they can just stay at S.L. 4.5. > Or just use the R in S.L. 4.5 and put it in their excludes line for > yum. > > This will allow us to get a new version out every 6 months, which should > keep at least a fair amount of the R users happy, I hope. I think that 6-monthly updates will certainly keep R fresh enough for our users - they seem to start complaining if it is more than 12 months old... :-) -- Jon Peatfield, Computer Officer, DAMTP, University of Cambridge Mail: [log in to unmask] Web: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/