On Wednesday, 21 February 2018 03.10.31 WET Max Pyziur wrote:

> ggplot2, tibble, tidyr dplyr. They seem to be popular and becoming more

> integral to R.

>

> As for the point about 435 on Ubuntu vs the ~140 on Fedora: I assume those

> 435 are reflective of popularity, frequency of usage, and maintenance. It

> would be ridiculous to put all 6,000 CRAN packages into the Fedora eco

> system.

>

> But consider perl and the number of packages that have been rpm'd, even

> though some are close to stale. The benefit of having a package is that it

> is built with the whole distro in mind.

>

> If you install packages local to a user, then they might not/probably are

> not available to other users (but to engage in self argument: how many

> other "users" have access to your own systems - desktop & laptop?)

>

> Sure, there is little challenge to installing R packages using

> install.packages("SomePackageName"); my concern is more for the sake of

> consistency: if perl, python, php, etc., have their modules/function

> libraries built for Fedora, why not R?

>

> Curious, not kvetching,

>

> MP

BTW I think that CRAN now is over 10 000 packages so even 435 is less than 5%.

I maintain some of those packages in Fedora, and from practical experience I can tell you that one of the problems when packaging a new R package into Fedora is that every time you start you have to unravel all the dependencies. Sometimes you need to go 5 levels deeps, with a net result of ~40/50 new packages that need to be added before adding the package you interested in.

Recently some of the packages required to have the packages you referred above are starting to show in Fedora. But that is a process that takes time and requires energy.

I presented a talk in useR 2008:

https://jamatos.fedorapeople.org/talk-user2008.pdf

FWIW this problem is not specific to R the same happens for python. There are packages where unraveling new dependencies is also a problem.

Regards,

--

José Matos