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0 pointsDayshine4y ago0 comments

For one, in my experience, CRAN only stores binaries of the most recent release of each package. This means that either you have to accept you can never rebuild a docker image, or you have to make sure that you are always able to recompile all of your R packages from source.

This means you don't just have to pin your R package versions, you have to pin all the build dependencies.

And you have to have a different image for different sets of R packages because they might have different build dependencies.

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claytonjy4y ago

Reproducibility is of course a valid concern, but I never had issues with that thanks to Rocker and MRAN.

I do sympathize with long from-source build times; as a Linux user I don't think I had binaries available until I stopped using R, so I've spent days, perhaps weeks, waiting for dplyr to install over the course of my R usage.

> different image for different sets of R packages because they might have different build dependencies

Is this not true of all software in all languages?

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