This repository contains the necessary scripts to get CRAN snapshots for
nixpkgs at specific dates.
I forked upstream nixpkgs for this: https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs
The reason being that I wanted to backport fixes for R packages but also for their dependencies, especially for macOS.
For a given date, the script from this repo checkouts a commit from upstream
nixpkgs, backports fixes, bumps the CRAN and Bioconductor packages, and then
creates a new branch and pushes to the rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs fork.
Each push to rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs starts a build in the
rstats-on-nix/build_tree repository. A default.nix defining an environment
with popular packages and packages that are complicated to build gets built on
Github Actions for Linux (amd64 and arm64) and macOS (arm64).
Here is the list of packages that were built and tested (but keep in mind that just because a package isn't listed, doesn't mean it's not going to work!):
Click to show package list
DBI
R6
RColorBrewer
RCurl
RSQLite
Rcpp
RcppEigen
arrow
askpass
backports
base64enc
bit
bit64
blob
broom
bslib
cachem
callr
cellranger
cli
clipr
collapse
colorspace
cpp11
crayon
curl
data_table
dbplyr
devtools
digest
dplyr
duckdb
evaluate
fansi
farver
fastmap
fontawesome
forcats
fs
gargle
generics
ggplot2
glue
gtable
haven
highr
hms
htmltools
htmlwidgets
httr
icosa
igraph
isoband
jquerylib
jsonlite
kit
knitr
labeling
later
lifecycle
lubridate
magrittr
memoise
mime
modelr
munsell
nloptr
openssl
openxlsx
pillar
pkgconfig
prettyunits
processx
progress
promises
ps
purrr
rJava
ragg
rappdirs
readr
readxl
rematch
rematch2
rlang
rmarkdown
rprojroot
rstan
rstudioapi
rvest
sass
scales
selectr
sf
shiny
stars
stringi
stringr
sys
systemfonts
terra
textshaping
tibble
tidyr
tidyselect
tidyverse
timechange
tinytex
tzdb
utf8
vctrs
viridisLite
withr
xfun
xlsx
xml2
yaml
zoo
These packages (and their direct dependencies) are guaranteed to build for the listed dates and platforms below. This doesn't mean that other packages won't work, only that I didn't test them. If you get a run-time error (meaning, you load the package, try to use it, but get some error) then please open an issue.
Then I "update" R packages on these dates (thanks to the Posit CRAN snapshots!!):
-
2019, working and tested on amd64 Linux (can potentially work on Intel Macs, but not Apple Silicon):
- 2019-03-14: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2019-03-14
- 2019-05-05: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2019-05-05
- 2019-07-22: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2019-07-22
- 2019-12-19: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2019-12-19
-
2020, working and tested on amd64 Linux (can potentially work on Intel Macs, but not Apple Silicon):
- 2020-03-12: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2020-03-12
- 2020-04-27: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2020-04-27
- 2020-06-07: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2020-06-07
- 2020-08-20: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2020-08-20
- 2020-10-30: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2020-10-30
For the year 2020, collapse is always at 1.6.5, which is the earliest version that we were able to compile for Nix.
- 2021, working and tested on amd64 Linux and Apple Silicon (can potentially work
on Intel Macs):
- 2021-02-26: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2021-02-26
- 2021-04-01: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2021-04-01
- 2021-05-29: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2021-05-29
- 2021-08-03: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2021-08-03
- 2021-10-28: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2021-10-28
The 2021 dates were particularly complicated to get to work on macOS, so we had
to make the following concession: the nixpkgs commit used as a basis is the
same as the one for January 2022 (mostly because support for Apple Silicon
before that was not quite there yet), and {cpp11} had to be updated from
version 0.4.0 to version 0.4.2, {rstan} from version 2.21.2 to version 2.21.3
and {arrow} is at version 9. {isoband} and {textshaping} also had to be
updated for the April and May dates. {testthat} also had to be updated from
3.0.2 to 3.0.4.
- 2022, working and tested on amd64 Linux and Apple Silicon (can potentially work
on Intel Macs):
- 2022-01-16: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2022-01-16
- 2022-04-19: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2022-04-19
- 2022-06-22: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2022-06-22
- 2022-08-22: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2022-08-22
- 2022-10-20: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2022-10-20
- 2022-12-20: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2022-12-20
For the year 2022, I use this commit of nixpkgs as a basis: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/5dfcc4f9ab8c09516715e2d3052e7de3e41a98c1, but for the one in
December I use this one instead: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/060f0dd496b10c5516de48977f268505a51ab116
- 2023, working and tested on amd64 Linux and Apple Silicon (can potentially work
on Intel Macs):
- 2023-02-13: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2023-02-13
- 2023-04-01: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2023-04-01
- 2023-06-15: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2023-06-15
- 2023-08-15: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2023-08-15
- 2023-10-30: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2023-10-30
- 2023-12-30: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2023-12-30
For the year 2023, I use this commit of nixpkgs as a basis:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/6da67309c6d13f6dde2f6608af883dd5f81316a1
for the February snapshot, this one for the April snapshot
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/71fa8d5b8fb70f00f891cbf935860c81306d8b7c
and for the others this one:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/e529b7fed078a9054cc3ea6a4c305edeff1b1e9f
The 2023 snapshots deal with the MASS issue where some versions of MASS where
released in 2023 that depended on the (at the time) development version of R
(version 4.4.0 that got released in February 2024).
- 2024, working and tested on amd64 Linux and Apple Silicon (can potentially work
on Intel Macs):
- 2024-02-29: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2024-02-29
- 2024-04-29: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2024-04-29
- 2024-06-14: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2024-06-14
- 2024-08-19: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2024-08-19
- 2024-10-01: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2024-10-01
- 2024-12-14: see https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/tree/2024-12-14
For the year 2024, I use this commit of nixpkgs as a basis:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/bcd2f0016d4f4f23bce8ef040bae83b12020d1cd
for the February, April, June and October commit, and this one for the rest of
the year I've used my daily CRAN snapshots from
https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/commits/r-daily by picking a suitable
date, and testing if the environment builds. If yes, then this becomes a
distinct branch.
For each date, the right version of R is built as well. Packages listed in the
default.nix are guaranteed to build, which should cover many use cases, but
this doesn't mean that other packages won't work. If you need a package at one
of these dates, but it doesn't work, feel free to open an issue.
- Why not use upstream
nixpkgs?
Upstream nixpkgs doesn't contain all versions of all R packages, and some
packages can stay in a broken state for quite some time before they're fixed.
Sometimes, even some R versions are not available, when these get updated too
quickly. So I decided to start the rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs fork which builds
upon a state of nixpkgs that contains several useful fixes, and backport
R specific fixes as well. This is especially important for macOS, so the
rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs fork should be much more macOS-friendly than upstream
if you need older versions of packages or R.
- How do I use this?
For now there is no easy way to use this. You can define an environment and
point to the fork like so in your default.nix:
let
pkgs = import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs/archive/refs/heads/2022-08-22.tar.gz") {};
which will build the environment at that date. At some point I will include a way to use this with rix.
- Why only these dates?
I tried to pick dates that cover all versions of R, Bioconductor, and main CRAN
packages like the ones from {tidyverse}. I initially planned to this daily, or
weekly, but realized I would end up with so many binaries that no one would end
up using that it wasn't really worth it. If you need a specific date though,
open an issue, and I'll do it for that date.
- Why use different commits of
nixpkgsas basis? Wouldn't it be better to only pick one?
Some R packages requires specific versions of specific development libraries, so
I need to pick a nixpkgs revision that contains these versions of these
libraries. Also, it can happen, especially for macOS, that some dependencies get
broken at certain dates, so I need to pick a date where these issues have been
fixed. For example mesa was marked as broken on darwin from 2023-05-29 until
2023-12-05 and curl must be on version 7 for R 4.2.2, so before a nixpkgs
revision before the 2023-03-20 had to be used. Another example was
libspatialite using a deprecated feature of one its dependencies, libxml2
which indirectly broke many R packages during the summer of 2024 for both Linux
and macOS. These situations are rather uncommon, but when they happen, oh boy.
- Why does it take hours to build the environment on my computer?
This is because many of these older packages are not in the public NixOS binary cache, so you have to build everything locally. I'm looking into setting up a public cache for this fork, in the meantime, I recommend you build the packages on Github Actions and cache the binaries using Cachix as explained here.