[R] building R 2.4.0 on aix

Mon Dec 4 19:26:27 CET 2006

Prof. Ripley:

Thanks for a clear statement of the situation.  Lack of response to
my post, coupled with the many prompt and knowledgeable responses
to other posts, led me to believe something like this must be true.

I have access to an AIX machine, and probably enough help to sort out
the 2.4.0 build issues under AIX.  I'm hoping to post something useful
to other AIX users in January or February.

Cheers,
Roy Heimbach

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> I've not seen any response to either of these messages, and so am replying in 
> an attempt to provide some explanation.  No core R developer has access to 
> AIX, nor have we had for some time.  (Most of the recent workarounds for AIX 
> have come from the kind efforts of Ei-ji Nakama.)  It does seem AIX rivals 
> Darwin (the underlying OS of MacOS X) for being the least alike of the 
> Unix-alikes (but fortunately we have Simon Urbanek to explain Darwin to us).
>
> We don't know if R 2.4.0 has been built successfully on AIX: we do know that 
> no one reported any problems in the alpha/beta/RC test period.  If no one 
> tested it, this indicates a lack of support for the R developers from the AIX 
> community.  I believe I have seen a report which indicated that R 2.3.1 was 
> built successfully.
>
> Some more specific comments to Eric Harley:
>
>> configure:26491: checking how to get verbose linking output from f95
>> configure:26502: f95 -c  conftest.f >&5
>> f95: 1501-218 file conftest.f contains an incorrect file suffix
>
> It seems your 'f95' is not a conventional Fortran compiler.  But you have not 
> told us what compiler it is: only if we know the full story can we advise 
> against it.
>
>> but make exits early with errors.
>
> Without telling us what they are, the experts here cannot help.
>
>
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Eric Harley wrote:
>
>> Roy and others,
>> 
>> I'm also trying to build R 2.4.0 on aix 5 (5.3 in my case, on an
>> Intellistation Power 285) and I have not had luck yet.  I notice that
>> the only mentions of AIX on this list in the past two months are
>> people not having luck building it.  So far there don't seem to be any
>> responses, and I don't know if it's from lack of information in the
>> questions, or because this isn't the right place to ask the questions.
>
> There have been replies, but no responses to those replies.  We often do not 
> find out if problems do get resolved.
>
>> Does anyone know a good place to ask such questions?  If this is the
>> right place, please let me know what information you need.
>> 
>> I am unfortunately very new to this business of compiling and linking
>> on Unix, so I have trouble knowing what information to provide.
>> 
>> Here's my stab at troubleshooting, which is basically trial-and-error:
>> 
>> ===
>> tried just to type ./configure (I can always dream, right?  :-) )
>> Failed with the following problem in config.log
>> 
>> configure:26491: checking how to get verbose linking output from f95
>> configure:26502: f95 -c  conftest.f >&5
>> f95: 1501-218 file conftest.f contains an incorrect file suffix
>> configure:26508: $? = 1
>> configure: failed program was:
>> |       program main
>> |
>> |       end
>> configure:26587: WARNING: compilation failed
>> configure:26593: result:
>> config.log (93%)
>> 
>> ===
>> A little playing around shows me that f95 doesn't like to compile
>> files ending in .f, so I try doing
>> ./configure F77=f77
>> 
>> In this case, the configure script completes successfully.
>> Now I try
>> make
>> 
>> but make exits early with errors.
>> make check
>> gives
>> 
>> make: 1254-002 Cannot find a rule to create target
>> ../../src/library/base/all.R from dependencies.
>> Stop.
>> 
>> and a few other 1254-004 errors.
>> 
>> ===
>> There are some examples in
>> http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html , particularly in
>> the AIX platform notes (C.9 AIX).  However, the second paragraph says
>> "The rest of this section is historical, as the default *_LDFLAGS were
>> changed in R 2.4.0." so evidently the examples don't apply to the
>> current version of R.  I tried some frankenstein combinations of the
>> options given in the examples, using the xl*_* compilers since I don't
>> have gfortran on my system, but this kind of thing is time-consuming
>> when I'm essentially making random changes.
>> 
>> I'm hoping that someone with more experience than I can at least help
>> me sort through the "Cannot find a rule to create target" error, and
>> that maybe I can proceed somehow one error at a time and finally end
>> up with something that works.
>> 
>> BTW, I did try to google the "Cannot find a rule to create target"
>> "from dependencies", but I don't get much that I can understand.  One
>> message said something about this means make can't find the source
>> code.  If this is the problem, how can I figure out what source code
>> make is looking for, where it's looking for it, and how to tell it the
>> right place to look?  Or perhaps there's something else I'm missing?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Eric Harley
>> 
>> 
>> On 11/20/06, Roy Heimbach <royh at hpc.unm.edu> wrote:
>>> I'm trying to build R 2.4.0 on aix 5 and not having much luck.  If
>>> anyone on the list has built 2.3 or 2.4 on AIX and would be willing
>>> pass along some hints, I would be grateful.  So would the research
>>> group that's waiting to use R.
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Roy Heimbach
>>> --
>>> Roy Heimbach <royh at hpc.unm.edu> / 505-277-8348
>>> User Services / Center for High Performance Computing
>>> University of New Mexico
>>> 
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide 
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>> 
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide 
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>> 
>
>

-- 
Roy Heimbach <royh at hpc.unm.edu> / 505-277-8348
User Services / Center for High Performance Computing
University of New Mexico