bug#26095: R: do not build recommended packages

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Ben,

> What do you think about having an "r" and
> "r-without-recommended-packages" instead of
> "r-with-recommended-packages" and "r", respectively?

> When people load R, they expect to have the recommended packages,
> don't they?

I’m not sure.  On the one hand it seems good to offer R with recommended
packages.  On the other hand, people who already use R from Guix would
probably install R packages from Guix as well.

If we offered R without the recommended packages by default, we would
still use the R variant without recommended packages for the
r-build-system.

This means that we’d have a package variable “r” with the package name
“r-without-recommended-packages” and a package variable
“r-with-recommended-packages” with the package name “r”.

Alternatively, we could change the r-build-system to use “r-minimal” by
default, rename “r” to “r-minimal” (both variable and package name), and
then rename “r-with-recommended-packages” to just “r” (both variable and
package name).

What do you think?

--
Ricardo

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