Given this previous thread on the subject of Bionic, is there a prospect for having Bionic or Focal available to build R projects?
Primary reason for R projects: AFAIK you can’t have precompiled GDAL 3 or PROJ >= 6 on Xenial, while these are needed more and more.
See here for R. Bivand’s recent note on this for the rgdal package. It was the reason why we had a temporary build failure on Xenial.
Focal has GDAL 3 or PROJ 6 available already in its repo, and for Bionic they can be installed by adding the ubuntugis-unstable PPA (not on Xenial though), but when trying to use:
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dist=focal: the build still reverted to (travis default) Xenial.- I see the Focal build environment is just out; but so this seems an interesting way.
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dist=bionic: the build does run Ubuntu Bionic, however it halts here because of an inaccessible https://travis-ci.rstudio.org/R-4.0.0-bionic.xz:$ curl -fLo /tmp/R-4.0.0-$(lsb_release -cs).xz https://travis-ci.rstudio.org/R-4.0.0-$(lsb_release -cs).xz 674curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 403
As a sidenote (maybe that should go in a separate topic), I see that the build automatically does a
sudo add-apt-repository -y "ppa:ubuntugis/ppa"
However on Bionic (and above) this will (currently) not suffice: this is the ubuntugis-stable PPA which only holds version 2 of GDAL and PROJ 5.
Considering the above, I’d suggest to add the ubuntugis-unstable PPA for Bionic.