[Rd] [R] Problem compiling in extra/xdr

[Prof Brian Ripley]

1) R-help is the wrong list: see the posting guide.  I've moved this 
to R-devel.

2) A glibc system should not be compiling in that directory.  glibc 
2.14 is rather recent and NEWS does say

* The RPC implementation in libc is obsoleted.  Old programs keep working
   but new programs cannot be linked with the routines in libc anymore.
   Programs in need of RPC functionality must be linked against TI-RPC.
   The TI-RPC implementation is IPv6 enabled and there are other benefits.

   Visible changes of this change include (obviously) the inability to link
   programs using RPC functions without referencing the TI-RPC library and the
   removal of the RPC headers from the glibc headers.
   Implemented by Ulrich Drepper.

So the answer seems to be that your libc is too new.

On Mon, 18 Jul 2011, Allin Cottrell wrote:

> I'm building R 2.13.1 on i686-pc-linux-gnu, using gcc 4.6.1
> and with glibc 2.14.
>
> I get this error:
>
> In file included from xdr.c:61:0:
> ./rpc/types.h:63:14: error: conflicting types for 'malloc'
> make[4]: *** [xdr.o] Error 1
>
> I can make the build proceed some by commenting out the declaration "extern 
> char *malloc();" in xdr/rpc/types.h,
> but then I get a slew of other errors:
>
> xdr_float.c: In function 'xdr_float':
> xdr_float.c:119:21: error: storage size of 'is' isn't known
> xdr_float.c:120:20: error: storage size of 'vs' isn't known
>
> and so on.
>
> config.log is rather big to post here; I'm putting it at
> http://www.wfu.edu/~cottrell/tmp/R.config.log .
>
> --
> Allin Cottrell
> Department of Economics
> Wake Forest University, NC
>
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>

-- 
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