---

debbie is an R package which aims to simplify installation of binary versions of CRAN packages hosted in Debian repositories from within an R session. While CRAN mirrors do offer source versions of R packages, repeatedly compiling these can be time-consuming, or present challenges whenever compilation fails.

This package was originally a basic set of functions I found useful when deploying web applications with Dash for R. I've attempted to make it a bit more user-friendly in case anyone else finds it useful.

How do I use debbie?

It's pretty simple: debbie includes a function called install_deb which will retrieve the Debian binary version of an R package given its name -- so to install data.table given the default mirror, the following should work:

library(debbie)
install_deb("data.table")

If a package name is unknown or unretrievable, install_deb will try to present a helpful error message before exiting gracefully.

> install_deb("foo")
Error in install_deb("foo") : 
  the package 'foo' was not found; the response returned was 404.

Where is debbie obtaining the resources it uses for the installation?

Debian Sources provides a nice API which permits searching source and package information via HTTP request, returning the results in JSON format.

The information returned when searching sources is relatively detailed (https://sources.debian.org/api/src/r-cran-data.table/):

{
  "package": "r-cran-data.table", 
  "path": "r-cran-data.table", 
  "pathl": [
    [
      "r-cran-data.table", 
      "/src/r-cran-data.table/"
    ]
  ], 
  "suite": "", 
  "type": "package", 
  "versions": [
    {
      "area": "main", 
      "suites": [
        "bullseye", 
        "sid"
      ], 
      "version": "1.12.6+dfsg-1"
    }, 
    {
      "area": "main", 
      "suites": [
        "buster"
      ], 
      "version": "1.12.0+dfsg-1"
    }, 
    {
      "area": "main", 
      "suites": [
        "stretch"
      ], 
      "version": "1.10.0-1"
    }, 
    {
      "area": "main", 
      "suites": [
        "jessie-backports"
      ], 
      "version": "1.10.0-1~bpo8+1"
    }
  ]
}

...while the information returned when querying the corresponding package is somewhat less informative (https://sources.debian.org/api/search/r-cran-data.table/):

{
  "query": "r-cran-data.table", 
  "results": {
    "exact": {
      "name": "r-cran-data.table"
    }, 
    "other": []
  }, 
  "suite": ""
}

In the absence of a full-featured package searching API, debbie uses the information retrieved from the sources API to construct a URL to the R binary package .deb file manually. Given a package name and release "code name" (sid, for example), install_deb will parse the JSON result, build this URL, then download the package (the default is to use the R session temporary directory returned by tempdir()).

Once downloaded, unpackPackage will then extract the R package subdirectory from the .deb file, which is packed using ar. If the appropriate (un)archiver can be found, and the .deb file itself contains a data.tar.xz archive, unpackPackage will place its contents into the temporary directory using ar and utils::untar.

Once all this is done, callr::rcmd is used to install the precompiled package, since R oddly has no option (as far as I can tell) to install a binary package on Unix/Linux hosts (currently it only allows Windows and Mac OS binaries to install via install.packages). It is somewhat crude, but R CMD INSTALL does work, and is what debbie uses to get the job done.

Finally, install_deb installs any required dependencies for the given package. The function attempts to be somewhat intelligent about this process, in that it will identify dependencies recursively using miniCRAN::pkgDep, and sort the results such that any packages available from Debian repos will be installed first -- and then the rest via CRAN.

What's the point of debbie when users can already download the packages via apt?

While it's preferable to use apt after adding the appropriate repositories to sources.list, it's slightly more involved to do so when deploying web applications to Dash Enterprise or Heroku.

This package may enable faster deployment of apps to remote hosts, while reducing the complexity of installing the packages in an environment where administrator privileges are unavailable. Additionally, although the largest collection of R package binaries is available from sid, most users will not want to configure this as the default branch in sources.list for all installs and updates. While it seems possible to selectively install only r-cran-* or r-base-* packages from sid, this configuration may not be intuitive for some users.

This package is very experimental. Like R, debbie is free software and comes with absolutely no warranty.