cran2copr: RPM repos with 15k binary R packages

Bringing R packages to Fedora (in fact, to any distro) is an Herculean task, especially considering the rate at which CRAN grows nowadays. So I am happy to announce the cran2copr project, which is an attempt to maintain binary RPM repos for most of CRAN (~15k packages as of Feb. 2020) in an automated way using Fedora Copr.

Are you a Fedora user? Enable the CRAN Copr repo for your system:

$ sudo dnf copr enable iucar/cran

and you are ready to go. Packages are prefixed with R-CRAN-, e.g.:

$ sudo dnf install R-CRAN-rstanarm

Currently, only x86_64 chroots for supported (non-EOL) versions of Fedora, including rawhide, are enabled. If you are interested in other chroots (from the supported architectures and distros), please open an issue on GitHub expressing so, but it is unlikely that it will be enabled in the short to medium term due to current storage limitations in the Copr infrastructure.

These repos are automatically synchronized with CRAN every day at 00:00 UTC through a GitHub Action that removes archived packages and builds the most recent updates. If you find any issue with any of the supported packages (see details and limitations below), please open an issue on GitHub.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the authors of cran2deb for the inspiration. Thanks to RedHat and, particularly, the Copr team for developing this tool and maintaining the Fedora Copr service for the Fedora community. And thanks to AWS too, because they provide a CDN for free.