Consider mentioning r2u, cran2copr, ...

[eddelbuettel]

Congratulations on getting this onto CRAN.

Dealing with this is a cross-platform manner is known to be hard, but on some systems one can do better and some do

• r2u for Ubuntu
• cran2copr for Fedora
• another one for OpenSUSE via OBS (forgot where the repo is)

@Enchufa2 and I have an arXiv paper on this. I also have a somewhat experimental older package RcppAPT that allows R to search the apt database on a Debian or Ubuntu system.

[choxos]

Congratulations on getting this onto CRAN.

Dealing with this is a cross-platform manner is known to be hard, but on some systems one can do better and some do

• r2u for Ubuntu
• cran2copr for Fedora
• another one for OpenSUSE via OBS (forgot where the repo is)

@Enchufa2 and I have an arXiv paper on this. I also have a somewhat experimental older package RcppAPT that allows R to search the apt database on a Debian or Ubuntu system.

Thank you, Dirk, both for the kind words and for the pointers, and thanks to you and @Enchufa2 for the paper, which I enjoyed reading.

You are right that on a distribution covered by r2u, cran2copr, or CRAN2OBS, the best answer to "which -dev packages do I need?" is often "none; install the binary and let the system package manager resolve it." sysreqr should say so rather than only teach people to chase headers.

I have added this to the next release (0.2.0):

• a "Binary package repositories for Linux" section in the README covering r2u, cran2copr, CRAN2OBS, bspm, and RcppAPT, citing your and Iñaki's paper (arXiv:2103.08069);
• a new FAQ entry ("Can I skip source compilation entirely?") plus mentions in the setup, fundamentals, and Docker vignettes (including rocker/r2u);
• setup_advice() now points Ubuntu users to r2u and credits cran2copr on Fedora (the iucar/cran Copr commands were already in the Fedora advice, now properly attributed).

sysreqr's niche stays the residual cases: packages the binary repos exclude, distributions without one (Debian stable, Alpine, RHEL clones), generating Dockerfile/CI snippets, and diagnosing logs from machines the user doesn't control. The docs now frame it that way.

This will be on GitHub shortly and in 0.2.0 on CRAN. Thanks again for taking the time to file this.