Does rv support managing R versions?

[andrader]

As title, does rv support managing R versions?

For instance, with uv you can specify --python VERSION in commands like uv venv ... and uv will manage installation of that python version.

Or do you recommend using other tools, like rig?

[dpastoor]

We suggest and are aware of finding r versions installed by rig!

[gwangjinkim]

I would love to see this happen without rig.

r-lib/rig#291
r-lib/rig#304

I once complained why rig requires root privileges.
For Bioinformaticians and I guess many Data Scientists, e.g. when working on HPC, being able to install wihthout root privileges is necessary.
Also in companies this would be of big advantage.
This is why I love conda. So well, one could use conda + rv then.

But it would be amazing to have this problem in rv.
And then, one uses uv for Python and rv for R. :)

Juliaup as well as Cargo can deal with it very well without root privileges.

[dpastoor]

the dilemma is its not just about installing R, the issue is also the tooling that surrounds the R ecosystem is not that good at using user installed versions as well. Eg Rstudio cannot discover those user installed versions. positron can, but overall the ability for users to actually get what they really want (install a version of R to a project, then have that environment activate in the IDE) is a bit of a chicken and egg problem of it just wouldn't work nearly the way people hope. In addition, there are some challenges with R being (or not being) as "standalone" as some of the capabilities of like the uv standalone python distributions.

So, we'll call this out-of-scope for our capacity to support without funding from some external company to help drive building out the additional infra we'd need to store/distribute/etc R versions to make this happen.