newest software on stable distro?
 

I need to use the newest version of the R package.
Trying to install rpm makes it want to switch the kernel to a new one and uninstall almost everything installed first. glibc causes this.

Is it impossible to get one new piece of software to run on an older distro?

What if you compile from source - does this make a difference?

Or do I need to install a development distro on my machine to get this?

Thanks

Its been a bit, but I installed R from source code and it really didn't have any problems or serious dependencies (I'm running Slackware 10.2) . I'm guessing that you're right about the RPM package causing some dependency issues so I would try installing from source and see if that works better. If you need to make a package, you could try using checkinstall, which replaces the make install step and can make RPM packages.