[Rd] Linking to the BH package introduces CRAN warnings

[Romain François]

> Le 4 nov. 2014 à 15:42, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> a écrit :
> 
> 
> On 4 November 2014 at 14:37, kaveh wrote:
> | Dear all,
> | 
> | I'm working on a project that links to the BH package
> | (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/BH/index.html).
> | 
> | My packages doesn't call entry points which might terminate R nor
> | write to stdout/stderr instead of to the console.
> | 
> | However, it seems some of the codes in the BH package
> | might. At any rate, when I include some boost headers such as
> | boost/math/distributions/ through BH, I get the following warnings
> |   when  submitting to the win-builder page:
> | 
> | 
> |    Found '_ZSt4cerr', possibly from 'std::cerr' (C++)
> | 
> |    Found 'abort', possibly from 'abort' (C), 'runtime' (Fortran)
> | 
> |    Found '_ZSt4cerr', possibly from 'std::cerr' (C++)
> | 
> |    Found 'abort', possibly from 'abort' (C), 'runtime' (Fortran)

You’re kind of out of luck. These functions are both:
 - used by the boost headers
 - forbidden by R, well at least forbidden by CRAN

> |   Furthermore, these warnings disappear when remove the boost
> |   headers and replace the call to boost functions by constants.
> | 
> | Looking at the CRAN-check diagnostics of some other packages that link to
> | BH, I do not see similar warnings, so I suppose it is possible to fix 
> | this issue.
> | Looking at their source code, it is not clear to me how these authors have
> | managed to do this, but this might be because I'm not that familiar with
> | boost to begin with. Can someone point me to some solution to this problem?
> 
> Briefly:
> 
> i) Your subject line is wrong.  You do not "link" to BH, you use it to
> include headers at compile time. That may seem like a small difference, but
> it is not. You generally want to avoid linking as much as you can, if only
> for cross-OS portability,

How would you not expect someone to be confused when « not linking to » BH requires the use of the `LinkingTo: BH` in the DESCRIPTION file. 

> ii) This the R-devel list for R question. You have a package question. You
> are generally advised to contact __the package authors__ and/or the package
> mailing list. And yes, BH has one in
> 
>    http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/boostheaders-devel/
> 
> though I grant you that it is not as well advertised as it should be. I just
> opened a ticket at https://github.com/eddelbuettel/bh/issues/3 to remind
> myself to improve that.
> 
> iii) As for your problem, only you and some careful bisections can help you
> there as we do not have your sources.  I too have packages including BH
> headers, but they do not pull in abort() or other things the CRAN gatekeepers
> prohibit us from deploying.
> 
> Dirk
> aka your friendly neighborhood BH maintainer
> 
> -- 
> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
> 
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