INSTALL

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On 2 Sep 1998, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

> Bill Simpson <wsimpson@uwinnipeg.ca> writes:
> 
> > I just installed R 0.62.3 and it seems to me  the INSTALL document is out
> > of date.  Now it seems it does it all "automatically", so the part in the
> > doc below can be deleted:
> > --------------------------------
> > INSTALLATION
> > 
> > After
> >         ./configure
> >         make
> > have been completed successfully, you can install the complete R tree
> > to your system by typing
> 
> Weeelll... Some people like to do the individual steps. In particular,
> if you're short of disk space, you could do
> 
> ./configure
> make R
> make help
> 
> and have a fairly minimal working system. 
> 
> Getting make to do the configure bit automagically is a bit of a hack
> and if you need to modify the configure, you do it by adding arguments
> to ./configure. So all in all, it's probably best to leave the
> two-step version in (but of course, one might start off with a note
> saying "On most systems, just type 'make'")

In particular if you are installing to a location other than /usr/local
you do need --prefix, and so have to run configure separately. (And
if you run pre-release or devel versions, you probably do want to install
elsewhere.)

What I would like the file to include is the information that you can
run without installing from the place you compiled, even after make clean.
That is a link of  /place/I/unpacked/bin/R to somewhere in your path
is all you need. And that does save disk space since during the install you
need two copies.  My installation procedure is

	./configure --prefix=...
	make
	/place/I/unpacked/bin/R   # check it runs
	make clean
	make install

As pedantry:

> Now type R and reach for your S manuals ...

on most (all) shells you will need to rehash, and in fact the default place
to install is not in the default path on Solaris (and I suspect most
non-gnu) systems.  But, would not a comment to read the R FAQ be useful? 


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@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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