FWIW, as promised, the talk slides can be found here:
http://jamatos.fedorapeople.org/talk-user2008.pdf
I am aware that there are some typos.
The thesis of the talk was that the relation between Fedora and R can placed
in a more general context, in this case between linux software distributions
and free software script languages.
The free languages like perl, python, tex, php and R (among others) have
developed a set of procedures to cope with installation and updating in
different operating systems.
On the other hand in Fedora (and other linux distributions) we have to deal
with different packaging models of open source languages and that give us a
different view point regarding the problem of installing and updating the
language and its libraries.
As you can see there is nothing earth shattering here. :-)
--
José Abílio