Will R 4.5.0 be supported? [Yes. It already is.]

[aymennasri]

The new version was published days ago and r2u only works with 4.4.0

[eddelbuettel]

False. The containers already use 4.5.0.

Jobs using apt to pull from the r2u will always use the newest R version provided by the Ubuntu "mirror" at CRAN (and e.g. I had a CI job via GitHub Actions doing just that this morning, and I checked). That part of "get me newest R on Ubuntu" is technically independent of r2u (as the role of r2u is to provide the 23k CRAN packages, not R itself) and I can do little about the fact that the CRAN mirrors only got R 4.5.0 this morning 🤷‍♂️ (That part is done by my friend Michael and I checked with him on the weekend. He uses the R package I look after for Debian and provided Friday morning.)

In any event, it is false as stated (no "will" only "is" and the answer is "of course").

edd@rob:~$ docker run --rm -ti rocker/r2u R --version
R version 4.5.0 (2025-04-11) -- "How About a Twenty-Six"
Copyright (C) 2025 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License versions 2 or 3.
For more information about these matters see
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

edd@rob:~$ 

[aymennasri]

Ah i see, I understand now. Thanks for explaining.

[eddelbuettel]

No worries. It is all 'layered' but it is somewhat technical to keep the layers apart.

[eddelbuettel]

How do you use r2u? If it is on a server or laptop or desktop or ... just run apt update -qq; apt uprade -y and R will be R 4.5.0. Else you have an issue with your apt set up.

[aymennasri]

It seems that you misunderstood my question, I already have R 4.5.0 and i downloaded it hours ago so I thought I should give r2u a shot to facilitate the transition so that I don't have to reinstall all of my packages + benefit from the speed gained by using r2u.

I assumed that the packages files will be in the usual /R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.x.x folder but i found none so i thought that it wasn't supported or that it was still working on R 4.4.0 (locally on my laptop)

tldr; it's all good now, it worked i just missed the presence of the new package in the installed packages list.

[eddelbuettel]

You misunderstand what r2u is, what it provides, and where it installs.

It exists so that you do not have to have to live with (in my opinions extremely poorly chose, yet still default) of per-version-library directories that R defaults to. The package I look after (i.e. the r-base binary for Debian and Ubuntu does not do that). See here:

edd@rob:~$ docker run --rm -ti rocker/r2u Rscript -e 'print(.libPaths())'
[1] "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "/usr/lib/R/site-library"      
[3] "/usr/lib/R/library"           
edd@rob:~$ 

Because R on Linux does not need a versioned directory. On Friday, we have 23,000 CRAN binary packages you can use as biinaries. On Friday morning you used them with R 4.4.3. By Friday at noon (if you were to use 'my' personal PPA as I do on this computer) you can access to a binary of R 4.5.0.

And that R 4.5.0 binary works with the same 23,000 binaries that R 4.4.* worked with. There is no ABI breakage in this upgrade.. Yes there was one between R 3.6.* and R 4.0.0. But that does not mean there is one on each upgrade.

None of this has much to do with r2u. But you may find it helpful to ask such questions on the r-sig-debian list (also for Ubuntu). It helps with general "how do I do X with R on Debian / Ubuntu"

[eddelbuettel]

(Reopening for earlier 'visibility' in case someone swings by with the same question.)

[andrewpking]

I'm not having any issues here. Running R 4.5.1 and CRAN is working great. Thank you for making this package for us. Happy to have CRAN support on Ubuntu 😄