[Rd] Compiling R (1.3.0) on AIX (4.3) fails (PR#1034)

[vogels@cmu.edu]

Hi,

This email reports bugs in acinclude.m4, src/library/tcltk/src/Makefile,
and share/perl/Rd2contents.pl.  It is based on R-patched.tgz from 07/27/2001
(R 1.3.0) and comes from trying to compile R on AIX 4.3.

1) acinclude.m4:  A string on line 3096 starts with a single quote: ' but
is terminated with a double quote: ".  (This leads to the weird error
message that configure can't execute 'shared' on line 4060.)
     The fix is simply to use single quotes both times:
allow_undefined_flag='${wl}-berok'

2) after configure (with CC=gcc but using AIX's linker /usr/bin/ld), the
Makefile in src/library/tcltk/src doesn't protect the linker flags -bI
with -Xlinker! (-Xlinker is required when using gcc so that the linker flags
are passed on to ld correctly.  Which I know that you know...)
  The fix is to add -Xlinker before every -bI. Sorry, haven't looked into
patching configure yet...

3) Rd2contents.pl:  this perl script fails in the base library!  There are
too many files in the man directory and perl reports 'glob failed'.  When I
try 'ls man/*.Rd'  bash also reports that the argument list is too long.  I
don't know whether this limitation comes from AIX, bash or perl and why it
doesn't happen with, say, Linux.
The fix is to replace the simple while loop (line 6):
  while(<$ARGV[0]/man/*.Rd>){ &do_one; }

with a loop over the contents of the directory using readdir:

if (opendir RD, "$ARGV[0]/man") {
    my $f;
    while (defined ($f = readdir RD)) {
     $_ = "$ARGV[0]/man/$f", &do_one if $f =~ m,.Rd$,;
    }
    closedir RD;
}

A) tkConfig.sh contains a line like this:
   TK_XINCLUDES='# no special path needed'
This has nothing to do with R proper but this bug which is either in AIX or
the local installation of X shows up during the compilation of R.  Anyhow,
this line is plain stupid since when passed on to the compiler _comments
out_ the rest of the line!  (Think about:
  gcc fine_program.c #no special path needed -lX11 -Xm
)  The fix is to use "TK_XINCLUDES=''" in tkConfig.sh
Again, I know this is not a problem with R but I'm adding it here for people
to find if they use the mailing list archive.

After these changes R compiles (producing warnings about duplicate
symbols...) and installs.  'make check' fails in mva--report to follow.

Regards,
  -tom

--
Email: vogels@cmu.edu



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