[R] problems compiling R packages with Linux

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, Ulf Mehlig wrote:

> Colin Farrow <c.farrow at geology.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>  > I had similar problems a few weks back. What are you using to
>  > compile the fortran? I guess it is either fort77 or g77. I had
>  > problems with these.  something to do with ld flags passed to
>  > fort77/g77 which don't get passed on to the ld stage. I eventually
>  > switched to egcs for compiling and linking and everything ran
>  > smoothly.
> 
> Hello Colin,
> 
> I was using gcc and g77 2.7.3.2 and 0.5.22, respectively. My (GNU)
> make is 3.76.1. I have egcs stuff on my machine, but simply putting
> that directory in front of the /usr/bin directory (where "normal" gcc
> lives) in PATH didn't compile completely, either. (Now "gcc -v" yielded
> "egcs-2.90.27 980315/egcs-1.0.2 release".)
> 
> I have to admit, that I don't even know, what egcs -- compared to gcc
> -- is ... My Linux rpm package didn't have a good description
> .. which egcs version did you use?
> 
> BTW, if there are incompatibilities between gcc/gcc-egcs, maybe the
> configure script should be made aware of them, shouldn't it?

[I don't think there are: the problem is what the configure script assumes
`linux' needs. Probbaly a g77/fort77 difference.]

On our Red-Hat 5.2 systems, with egcs-g77 installed, I have to set

SHLIBLDFLAGS=-shared

in config.site. It looks to me as is that is your problem too. This
is not inconsistency, just a failure to guess right. I never trust
configure scripts, so do check over these things (they are in the file
Makeconf) and override in config.site any I don't agree with.

egcs is basically a later version of gcc (which has been at 2.8.1 for
quite some time).  (Further, even the recent RH 5.2 has quite an old gcc). 
I think there are known optimization problems with egcs-1.0.2 (RH5.2 has
1.0.3a)  but I would get and use 1.10b, which seems very stable on all the
platforms we have (it is the version used to compile R on Windows, too).


-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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