Sun, 26 Apr 2020

#26: Upgrading to R 4.0.0

Welcome to the 26th post in the rationally regularized R revelations series, or R4 for short.

R 4.0.0 was released two days ago, and a casual glance at some social media conversations appears to suggest quite some confusion, almost certainly some misunderstandings, and possibly also a fair amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the process. So I thought I could show how I upgrade my own main workstation, live and in colour without a safety net. (Almost: I did upgrade my laptop yesterday which went swimmingly, if more slowly.) So here is a fresh video about upgrading to R 4.0.0, with some support slides as usual:

The slides used in the video are at this link.

A few quick follow-ups to the ‘live’ nature of this. The pbdZMQ package did in fact install smoothly once the (Ubuntu) -dev packages for Zero MQ were (re-)installed; then IRkernel also followed. BioConductor completed once I realized that GOSemSim needed the annotation package GO.db to be updated, that allowed MNF to install. So the only bug, really, was the circular depdency between pkgload and testthat. Overall, not bad at all for a quick afternoon session!

And as mentioned, if you are interested and have questions concerning use of R on a .deb based system like Debain or Ubuntu (or Mint or …), the r-sig-debian list is a very good and friendly place to ask them.

If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

/code/r4 | permanent link