Question:

Does a container instantiated from bioconductor_docker:RELEASE_X_Y also pull CRAN packages from reproducible image (e.g. via MRAN) and if not how do I accomplish this?

Motivation:

I'm building an image with both Bioconductor and CRAN packages and want versions of both repositories pinned to a specific date.

Background:

The Bioconductor docker documentation mentions rocker/rstudio.

However, unlike rocker/r-ver, the above images do not seem to be pinned to any reproducible CRAN image (e.g. MRAN in the case of rocker/r-ver)

NB: this question is cross-posted on stack here

As far as I know any of the Bioconductor Docker containers will use the default repository options for CRAN, which is to install the latest version of a package. This is regardless of which Bioconductor release you're using. Even if you use RELEASE_3_13 (released May 2021) and you run install.packages('dplyr') you'll get the version of dplyr that is current today in February 2022. This is not the case for Bioconductor packages, where you'll get the last version of a package that was available before Bioconductor 3.14 was released.

One option is to use the CRAN snapshots provided by RStudio Package Manager where something like options(repos = c(CRAN = "https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/cran/2021-12-15")) would use the snapshot taken on 15th December 2021. There are more details on this at https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/__docs__/admin/getting-started/user-interface-overview/#ui-frozen-urls