R 4.0.0 coming in four weeks

[Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>]

The preparations for R 4.0.0 have started. Peter Dalgaard, upstream's release
manager, cut the first alpha release today.  The detailed plan is as always
available [1] (and has been for a bit). As always, there is a long and
impressive list of changes [2].

We have four weeks until April 24 when it will be released.

First steps I have taken:

 - I made a first release available in "experimental". [3] And I also changed
   the tag to r-api-4.0.

 - As I and others also work on Ubuntu (directly or also via Travis CI and
   alike) I also created a new PPA 'r-4.0' and populated it with the build,
   so far only for 18.04 ("bionic"). [4][5]

We probably need some sort of plan for rebuilding all our packages / staging
some things etc pp.  I am open to any and all suggestions; I am still not all
that familiar with how to 'best' proceed both within Debian, and for the
'backports'.  

Cheers, Dirk


[1] http://developer.r-project.org/
[2] https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/trunk/doc/NEWS.Rd -- I cheated via
the GH mirror. There is probably also a html-rendered version somewhere...
[3] https://incoming.debian.org/debian-buildd/pool/main/r/r-base/r-base_3.6.3.20200326-1.dsc
[4] https://launchpad.net/~edd/+archive/ubuntu/r-4.0/+packages
[5] From a 'Rocker' container running 18.04:
    root@4c884498c150:~# add-apt-repository --enable-source --yes "ppa:edd/r-4.0"
    [... apt update and upgrade skipped ...]
    root@4c884498c150:~# R --version | head -1
    R version 4.0.0 alpha (2020-03-26 r78078)
    root@4c884498c150:~# 

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd@debian.org