Re: R as on Ubuntu and Fedora

[George N. White III]

On 20 February 2018 at 19:28, Max Pyziur <pyz(a)brama.com&gt; wrote:

>  Greetings,
>
>  I've been learning R on both Fedora and Ubuntu.
>
>  I've noticed that Ubuntu has considerably greater support for R than
>  Fedora (more R deb packages than R rpm packages).
>
>  Is there a rationale for this?
>  
Counting the number of packages isn't worth the effort.  R is used by many
different communities, e.g., pharma, academia, etc.  Within these
communities, linux users tend to gravitate to the same platform and
packages used in that community will get attention on that platform.  Many
R packages use external libraries, so user communities will insist that
these libraries are packaged and usable.  Ubuntu is a very popular
distribution, so can be expected to have a wider range of user communities.
You may, however, find that key libraries and R packages for your subject
area are not current or have unreported bugs (because they are not heavily
used).

While you are learning R, any distro should provide basic packages.   If
your ultimate interest is in a specialized subject area, you need to look
at the packages and support libraries being used in that field and check
for packages of current versions.   For advanced R users, the biggest issue
is not R packages, but the presence of workable support libraries.  If you
suitable supporting libraries, it is generally very simple to install
current R packages from the sources on CRAN.

My work is in remote sensing and uses spatial statistics and images.  A
"mission critical" package from a national space agency was developed on
Ubuntu, so I use Ubuntu but have often had to build some supporting
libraries (gdal, hdf5, netcdf4) because the distro packages for these
libraries were outdated or built with stripped own options that make them
unusable for my work.  This situation has improved over time, but just when
I think the distro has caught up with my needs a new feature is introduced
and I end up having to build support libraries from sources all over
again.   Building support libraries often gets into nitty gritty
distro-specific details figuring out how to ensure that your R packages use
the locally compiled libraires without creating conflicts with the
distro-supplied versions of the packages.

-- 
George N. White III