Within the world of the R system, language and environment, the CRAN and BioConductor archives have achieved remarkable success in attracting a consistent inflow of new packages of high quality contributions and extensions to the R system. At the same time, the Debian distribution (and its derivatives such as Ubuntu) has continued to make it easier for users to obtain a consistent and complete software installation. In Debian’s case, this has resulted in an unprecedented ten installable architectures. For Ubuntu, a focus on easier installation and added polish means that the ’barriers to entry’ for new users have been lowered, which has resulted in increased market- and mind share for Debian and Ubuntu. This paper presents an effort to bring the R package repositories and the Debian Linux distribution together. This provides a unique statistical environment: essentially all CRAN, BioConductor and Omegahat packages can be installed automatically onto Debian (or Ubuntu) from pre-built binary packages with a single command. Our initial reference builds cover well over 1700 packages taken from the CRAN, BioConductor and Omegahat repositories.
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