About using binaries vs. installing from source

[pat-s]

Hi Jim,

thanks a lot for the effort in getting GH actions to work easily for R packages. Just browsed your rstudio::conf slides.

We are in the process to support GH actions also in {tic}, building on your "actions".

I see that your are putting in a lot of effort to move towards using R package binaries, even on Linux.
While this comes with a nice speed up for dependency installation, it comes with the issues of R packages which need to link against a system library.
Let's use {rJava} as the best example here ;)

I am wondering if using binaries might introduce more problems in CI than it helps - and if using source installs only (even on Windows) combined with caching the R user library might be the more robust way for most users.
However, installing certain system libs on Windows is of course a medium pain and that's also one reason why binaries exist.
If one wants to test on R-devel, source is the only option anyways.
Also I also like the idea of having the same "build process" for the dep installs across all platforms and pulling away the pain of thinking about binary/source differences at all.

Curious about your view on this.

[jimhester]

We already handle system dependencies on linux automatically when using linux binaries using the sysreqs package.

People are always welcome to fall back to using source in their own workflows if they find the binaries are causing problems, but I think defaulting to binaries in the examples the right choice.

[pat-s]

We already handle system dependencies on linux automatically when using linux binaries using the sysreqs package.

Which is a very good effort and I just asked Gabor a few days ago if I can help to push support forwards. Still lots of libs missing and lots need some maintenance.

Also, while Linux might be kind of "easy", Windows is always the bigger problem.

[jimhester]

Windows is not really a problem for most packages, we generally use static linking for system dependencies on Windows, e.g. https://github.com/rwinlib rather than relying on shared libraries installed by the users.

I think using package binaries is generally the right choice, however none of the custom actions require them, you can always modify the example workflows for your projects to use only source packages if you feel that is more robust.

[github-actions]

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