[Rd] Building R with f2c - still needed?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Thank you both for the comments.  The problem is that we have a lot of 
special-casing for f2c in the configure code, and I think it is becoming 
unmaintainable.  (I've been doing some cleaning up after discovering 
several errors in little-used cases, e.g. a substitute for alloca was 
compiled iff --enable-R-shlib was not specified.)

A cleaner solution would be to use a wrapper for f2c as a pseudo-compiler. 
I'll test that, and if it works then start to strip the special-casing 
out.

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 09:48:56PM +0000, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>> Does anyone have a need to use f2c rather than a Fortran compiler to build
>> R?
>
> We used f2c up until a few months ago as a last line of defence against
> crappy Fg77 code on m68k/arm (one or both, it changed at times).
>
> I'd be hesitant about throwing it out, but it is of course your call.
>
> Thanks, Dirk
>
> -- 
> Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.
>                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison
>
>

-- 
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