r-system-requirements
System requirements for R packages
This repository provides a catalog of rules that automatically map the free-form SystemRequirements field in R package DESCRIPTION files to specific system installation commands for different Linux distributions. It solves the problem of translating vague requirements like “libcurl” into concrete commands like apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev.
The rules cover major Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RHEL, Rocky Linux, openSUSE, and Fedora. Rather than maintaining a massive table mapping every R package to its dependencies, this approach uses regular expressions to pattern-match requirements and generate OS-specific installation commands. The catalog powers Posit Package Manager and is also used by the pak package to automatically install system dependencies when installing R packages.
