[R] Fedora Core 4

[Prof Brian Ripley]

There has been discussion of this on R-devel in the context of the release 
of 2.1.1.

FC4 contains gfortran, not g77 (unless you install everything when you 
get g77 from gcc-3.2.3 in some compatibility RPM).  This is not a bug: R 
compiled on one OS (or even machine) is not expected to work on another.
-lg2c is part of gcc-3.x.y, and gfortran uses something like -lgfortran 
(FC3's gcc4 didn't use the standard name, so I am being cautious).

I think it is fortuitous that R runs in your tests without crashing: 
libRlapack.so is linked against libg2c.0.0 and actually calls entry points 
in it.  (The R executable is also linked but seems to contain no such 
entry points.)

I would suggest installing 2.1.1 on Monday from the sources, or waiting 
for a 2.1.1 RPM.  I believe gcc-3.4.4 is still a better choice than 
gcc-4.0.0 on ix86: it runs faster and there are several cases in which 
4.0.0 appears to give incorrect answers.  I am waiting for the eventual 
release of 4.0.1 to test these more thoroughly.  (See the notes in the 
R-admin manual: fortunately FC4's gcc4 is just recent enough to avoid the 
showstopper bug.)

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005, Jonathan Baron wrote:

> I had installed R from source on Fedora Core 3.  Then I upgraded
> to Fedora Core 4, but left R alone.  R worked fine, until I trued
> to update.packages().  Even then, many packages updated just
> fine, but two of them, cluster and mgcv, failed with the
> following error message (using cluster as an example):
>
> gcc -shared -L/usr/local/lib -o cluster.so clara.o daisy.o
> dysta.o fanny.o meet.o mona.o pam.o spannel.o twins.o  -lg2c -lm -lgcc_s
> /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lg2c
> collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
> make: *** [cluster.so] Error 1
>
> I tracked this down as far as I could and got to this page:
> http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/usage.html
> in the section about "Compatability with g77."  The problem seems
> to have something to do with Fortran.

Interesting spelling!

> Before I invest more time, I wonder if someone knows what to do.
> Options:
> 1. Re-install R from source.
> 2. Try the RPM for Fedora Core 4.  It isn't in CRAN, but it is in
> Fedora "extras".  R is now part of the Fedora distribution,
> albeit one of the many things they have put in "extras" in an
> effort to limit the distribution to 4 CDs.
> 3. Report a bug.  But where?  Is it a bug in R?
> 4. Something else.

-- 
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