Debian/Ubuntu r-base-*, r-cran-*, revolution-r packages: porting to ArchLinux

Recently I've migrated to Arch Linux, after ~4 years being loyal to Ubuntu. Everything works like a charm, it's noticeably faster than Ubuntu, IMHO it's easier to customise, but when it is to do with support for R, well, Ubuntu takes a medal. I'm not willing to do another distro-shuffle and switch back to Ubuntu, while Debian is just "too stable" for my taste... so I'll stick with Arch for now.

Bunch of R packages available from Ubuntu's universe and/or multiverse repos (like r-cran-* and revolution-r) are not available in Arch. Of course, you can always install packages within R with install.packages, but there are dozens of Debian/Ubuntu R packages, and excuse me for saying this, but it's painstaking job to track them down. r-cran-lattice can be replaced with install.packages("lattice"), but what about revolution-r (revolution-mkl)? I'd like to have RA optimizations in Arch.

Could you, please, give me some advice about this one? What's the catch? r-core, r-base-dev, r-base-core-dbg, r-base-core-ra... Actually, I have two qu开发者_如何学JAVAestions:

• What's the difference between these (r-base-*) packages and "standard" R installation?
• And how can I port Debian/Ubuntu packages to Arch (I'm talking only about those packages that don't come bundled with an official installation, like r-cran-* and Revolution-R-like packages)?

It would be nice if Arch-ers could have out-of-the-box support for R, like Debian, Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora users. I know it's manageable, I just want to know how hard it is.

Quick ones:

• Debian is just "too stable" is true only if you only look at Debian stable -- but you could pick Debian testing (as I do) which gets updated packages on a daily basis once they lasted for ten days on unstable. This works for me and has been for over a decade (!!). You also get cran2deb and 2400+ binary r-cran-* deb packages (currently i386 only)

• difference between r-base-* and "standard" R: none. I try hard to maintain these packages without deviances, yet you get little extras like tab completion etc

• port from Arch: no idea, as Debian (and Ubuntu) work for me

In short, looks like you picked something different and now seem to notice it is different (as in "less complete support for R").

Install dpkg in Arch (from AUR, best with yaourt) and you can go.