Welcome to the 24nd post in the relentlessly regular R ravings series, or R⁴ for short.

R 4.0.0 will be released in less than two weeks, and testing is very important. I had uploaded two alpha release builds (at the end of March and a good week ago) as well as a first beta release yesterday, all to the Debian ‘experimental’ distribution (as you can see here) tracking the release schedule set by Peter Dalgaard. Because R 4.0.0 will require reinstallation of all packages, it makes some sense to use a spare machine. Or a Docker container. So to support that latter mode, I have now complemented the binaries created from the r-base source package with all base and recommended packages, providing a starting point for actually running simple tests. Which is what we do in the video, using again the ‘R on Ubuntu (18.04)’ Rocker container:

Slides from the video are at this link.

This container based on 18.04 is described here on the Docker Hub; a new 20.04 container with the pre-release of the next Ubuntu LTS should be there shortly once it leaves the build queue.

What we showed does of course also work on direct Ubuntu (or Debian, using those source repos) installations; the commands shown in the Rocker use case generally apply equally to a normal installation.

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.