[Rd] [Fwd: opened symbols in libR.so available.]

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Two quick comments while I catch up with the email back log from travelling:

On 28 November 2009 at 10:50, Guillaume Yziquel wrote:
| I've been told that there's an interesting scheme, used by r-base-ra, to 

It's 'r-base-core-ra' and I mentioned that in off-line email only to show
that you can arrange to have more than one R interpreter in Debian.

On 29 November 2009 at 16:54, Guillaume Yziquel wrote:
| Interfacing to hidden symbols in order to try out stuff from an 
| interactive session is also a good reason.  I'd rather have to deal with 
| a moving API than contemplating an API moving.

As Duncan, Uwe, and I have told you already, this may get frustrating in the
long run as changes may break your bindings. Accessing a hidden API is doing
so against the wishes of the API designers / maintainers...

| That's what I did. As I did not want to screw up my whole Debian system, 
| I built up a package, which might be useful for people writing language 
| bindings. It's pointless to buy a second computer or meddle with chroots 
| just to recompile R. That's all.

You do not need a chroot or second computer either.  Just how r-base-core-ra
uses the normal --prefix argument to configure to install into a second,
non-overlapping file tree, you could use /usr/lib/ROcaml/ or some directory
other than /usr/lib/R + /usr/share/R which are taken by the R package for
Debian.  R developers use the same --prefix trick to keep r-releases,
r-patched, r-devel, ... installed at the same time.

Anyway, good luck with the endeavour. Something useful may well come from it.

Cheers, Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.