eddelbuettel / snap-r-base

Snapcraft for R

snap packaging of R

What is this?

This repo contains a snapcraft build recipe for the R system for statistical computation and graphics.

What is the current status?

It builds and runs but is still raw. Currently open issues are:

• locales are not provided by the core snap:
  • this is being worked as an core snap extension we plan to use once available
  • configuring with --disable-nls turns the support off yet the warnings persist
• packages cannot link though they now compile: possibly a path issue in Makeconf
  • this is not specific to R but to the snap, it also fails to compile and link simple C/C++ programs
  • run with r-base.shell to launch a shell and test there

What is already done?

At the June 2019 snapcraft summit a solid foundation was established:

• the snapcraft recipe builds R from source
• the resulting snap works in the preferred strict confiment
• several important system resources can be accessed and work:
  • networking is available and e.g. CRAN packages can be downloaded
  • desktop resources (font metrics etc) are available, graphics work
  • all key R capabilities() are supported
• Makeconf reflects paths to headers and libraries reflecting the build stage, however linking does not yet work but we are fairly close to compiling package s### More documentation?

More documentation?

Start at the snapcraft site itself with its link to the docs site.