[Rd] [R] Somewhat obscure bug in R 3.4.0 building from source

[Peter Dalgaard]

Inline below...

> On 21 May 2017, at 20:57 , Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 21/05/2017 10:30 AM, Peter Carbonetto wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I uncovered a bug in installing R 3.4.0 from source in Linux, following the
>> standard procedure (configure; make; make install). Is this an appropriate
>> place to report this bug? If not, can you please direct me to the
>> appropriate place?
> 
> Generally R-devel is better; I've responded there.
> 
>> 
>> The error occurs only when I do "make clean" followed by "make" again; make
>> works the first time.
>> 
>> The error is a failure to build NEWS.pdf:
>> 
>> Error in texi2dvi(file = file, pdf = TRUE, clean = clean, quiet = quiet,  :
>>  pdflatex is not available
>> Calls: <Anonymous> -> texi2pdf -> texi2dvi
>> Execution halted
>> make[1]: *** [NEWS.pdf] Error 1
>> make: [docs] Error 2 (ignored)
>> 
>> and can be reproduced wit the following sequence:
>> 
>> ./configure
>> make
>> make clean
>> make
> 
> We usually don't build in the source directory; see the second recommendation in the admin manual section 2.1.  So it's possible there's a bug triggered when you do that.  Can you try building in a separate directory?

Notice that the error is that "pdflatex" is missing from your setup. We do, for the benefit of users with defective TeX installations supply a pre-built NEWS.pdf (and NEWS.html too) in the source tarballs. However, they are technically make targets and make clean will wipe them; in that case, you had better have the tools to rebuild them! 

-pd

> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
>> 
>> This suggests to me that perhaps "make clean" is not working.
>> 
>> I'm happy to provide more details so that you are able to reproduce the bug.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Peter Carbonetto, Ph.D.
>> Computational Staff Scientist, Statistics & Genetics
>> Research Computing Center
>> University of Chicago
>> 
>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>> 
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> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
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Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com