Ubuntu: Build packages from source

crossxwill · January 27, 2020, 2:07am

I have a comment related to this post:

Is it normal to have to install most packages from source in Ubuntu R? General

I got to like R under Windows, and I got to love it under OSX. Installation is very simple, especially now that I'm able to link high performance BLAS also in OSX (previously I used MRAN in Windows to achieve the same results). It turns out I was spoiled: R in Linux (in Docker, actually, but let's consider just Ubuntu for now) is much more annoying, which surprised me (I always thought Linux to be the Emperor of Scientific Computing Environments). I can't even get the latest R binaries. I had a look at https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README.html specifically, R 3.5 packages for Ubuntu on i386 and amd64 are available for [...] Bionic Beaver (18.04;LTS). Note, to install R 3.…

When I run install.packages() on Ubuntu, every package needs to be built from source.

Is this true for Red Hat as well?

Windows and MacOS have package binaries, which greatly reduce the amount of time for package installation.

Imagine if I had an Ubuntu server and I wanted to install 1,000 packages and each package took 5 minutes to build: (5* 1000) / 60 = 83. We're talking about 83 hours of build time (> 3 days)!

Blair09M · January 27, 2020, 2:28am

CRAN does not provide linux binaries for R packages. This statement from the R Installation and Administration document is instructive:

On Unix-alikes (except macOS) [install.packages] consults the list of available source packages on CRAN (or other repository/ies), downloads the latest version of the package sources, and installs them (via R CMD INSTALL ).

As an alternative, RStudio Package Manager enables users to install Linux binaries for R packages.

technocrat · January 27, 2020, 4:31am

Anything that makes it to CRAN is guaranteed to compile on Linux if system library dependencies are met. The same isn’t true of OS, and users on that platform are very fortunate that Simon Urbanek of the R Core Team takes on the nontrivial work of modifying the source to create the binaries. It’s foreseeable that future convergence with iOS could make that infeasible.