[Rd] Comments on the R-2.0.0 release (PR#7351)

[ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]

I don't see the bug report in here.  What is the bug you wished to report?
(That R requires some flags set on some platforms is documented in the 
R-admin manual, and not a bug.)

Comments are better sent to the mailing list, not the bug repository, as 
someone now has to decide what to do with this.

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 beebe at math.utah.edu wrote:

> Builds of the R-2.0.0 release have been considerably more successful
> at my site than previous releases.  I now have it installed on these
> platforms:
> 
> 	Apple PowerPC G3 267MHz	GNU/Linux 2.4.19-4a (Yellow Dog Linux release 2.3 (Dayton))
> 	Compaq Alpha Sierra	OSF/1 5.1
> 	Compaq/DEC Alpha	OSF/1 4.0F
> 	Intel Itanium-2		GNU/Linux Red Hat Linux Advanced Server release 2.1AS (Derry)
> 	Intel Pentium II	FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE #0
> 	Intel Pentium III	FreeBSD 5.0
> 	Intel Pentium III	GNU/Linux 2.4.18-26.8.0smp (Red Hat 8.0 (Psyche))
> 	Intel Pentium III	GNU/Linux 2.4.21-20.ELsmp (Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 3 (Taroon Update 3))
> 	Intel Pentium III	NetBSD 1.6
> 	Intel Pentium III	OpenBSD 3.2
> 	Intel Pentium III	Solaris 9 x86
> 	SGI Origin 200		IRIX 6.5
> 	Sun SPARC		GNU/Linux 2.2.19-6.2.1 (Red Hat 6.2)
> 	Sun SPARC		Solaris 2.7
> 	Sun SPARC		Solaris 2.8
> 	Sun SPARC		Solaris 2.9
> 
> However, builds initially failed on several of these systems because
> of errors like this:
> 
> 	/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lX11
> 
> On these systems, I was able to restart the build with
> 
> 	make LDFLAGS=-L/usr/X11R6/lib
> 
> and have it complete successfully.  I've recently seen some other
> packages that failed to compile for the same reason: the list of
> standard locations that is searched at configure time for X11
> libraries is out-of-date.  The R-2.0.0 configure.ac script has this
> snippet:
> 
> 	for dir in /usr/bin/X11 /usr/X11R6/bin /usr/openwin/bin; do
> 	  r_xtra_path="${r_xtra_path}${PATH_SEPARATOR}${dir}"
> 	done
> 
> However, it does not seem to have an analogue for the corresponding
> lib directory.

That's because configure --help says

X features:
  --x-includes=DIR    X include files are in DIR
  --x-libraries=DIR   X library files are in DIR

so I think you omitted --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib.
This is also documented in the R-admin manual.  


Note that including /usr/X11R6/lib would be rather dangerous, as on 64-bit
Linux systems the correct directory is (at least on ours)  
/usr/X11R6/lib64.  I believe all properly configured systems will have the
appropriate one of /usr/X11R6/lib64, /usr/X11R6/lib in the default library
path, but if not it will not be a good idea for R to start guessing.

[...]

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595