Recently I've migrated to Arch Linux, after ~4 years being loyal to Ubuntu. Everything works like a charm, it's noticeably faster than Ubuntu, IMHO it's easier to customise, but when it is to do with support for R, well, Ubuntu takes a medal. I'm not willing to do another distro-shuffle and switch back to Ubuntu, while Debian is just "too stable" for my taste... so I'll stick with Arch for now.
Bunch of R packages available from Ubuntu's universe and/or multiverse repos (like r-cran-* and revolution-r) are not available in Arch. Of course, you can always install packages within R with install.packages, but there are dozens of Debian/Ubuntu R packages, and excuse me for saying this, but it's painstaking job to track them down. r-cran-lattice can be replaced with install.packages("lattice"), but what about revolution-r (revolution-mkl)? I'd like to have RA optimizations in Arch.
Could you, please, give me some advice about this one? What's the catch? r-core, r-base-dev, r-base-core-dbg, r-base-core-ra... Actually, I have two questions:
- What's the difference between these (
r-base-*) packages and "standard" R installation? - And how can I port Debian/Ubuntu packages to Arch (I'm
talking only about those packages
that don't come bundled with an official installation, like
r-cran-*and Revolution-R-like packages)?
It would be nice if Arch-ers could have out-of-the-box support for R, like Debian, Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora users. I know it's manageable, I just want to know how hard it is.