[R] RH6,2 / make check / f2c

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Fri, 26 May 2000, Christian Posse wrote:

> I would like first to thank Prof. Ripley for his hint.
> 
> R 1.01 built from the source and all contrib packages
> work fine when using gcc-2.95.x  Too bad RedHat
> stopped shipping it along ecgs since 5.2.
> 
> Two questions come from all the comments:
> 
> - is f2c unsafe? I was not able to find any comment
> in the R distribution about what I just learned from
> Prof Ripley and Oksanen. This would be certainly
> an enlightening admission.

I think it is slightly unsafe: see below.

> - My earlier installation of R with f2c produces
> no error  when checking with "make check".
> Can I conlcude that I had a safe installation?

Probably.  Unfortunately few things in make check test that you get the
right answer, just that things ran.  A few do, hence the reports on
R-bugs of errors in example(eigen) on some machines.  The problem is that
there are so many machine-accuracy points that it is hard to write
tests that will pass on all reasonable installations and fail on all
problematic ones.  (We, especially Martin Maechler, do try.)

My worry is as follows. If you configure R with f2c, it uses f2c for all
the contributed/local packages.  We have seen examples of packages that
compiled and ran under f2c even though the source code was not valid
Fortran and did not do what its author intended when translated.

-- 
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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