Getting r-travis to install dependencies from the PPA?

[cboettig]

Hi Craig,

It seems like r-travis is installing the listed package dependencies manually from source, even when many are available on Michael Rutter's PPA. Am I doing something wrong? (e.g. in this travis build).

I realize that we cannot assume all the dependencies can be met from the PPA versions, but it would be nice if r-travis figured out which ones could and attempted to use that. It seems a nuisance to have to manually copy the dependency list to aptget_install.

Thanks for a great project,

Carl

[craigcitro]

so there's no trivial way to make this work -- currently we use devtools to handle installing the package dependencies, and it's totally agnostic to the underlying package manager (in this case, apt).

that said, it's not so unreasonable to imagine a simple twist on this -- ask devtools for the package dependencies, and then try doing an install_r_binary on each one, skipping missing packages. there are some possible issues around lag between "new package" and "package in the PPA", but that's probably pretty minor.

(i'll try and give this a go, but it's going to be backed up behind a few other things.)

[cboettig]

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Right, the lag between CRAN and the PPA is small but real, though of course the package maintainer should declare if they need the most recent version. In that case, I imagine devtools would attempt to install an updated version from CRAN? Even in that case, the r-travis user would still have the benefit of not having to resolve systemRequirements manually. Thanks for considering it in the queue!