[Rd] building R with gcc on Solaris

ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Mon Feb 10 09:11:02 2003


Both gcc 3.2.1 and 3.2.2 (the current version) have problems building R on
32-bit Solaris (that is not using the -m64 flag).  The symptoms found so
far are crashes when attempting to draw graphics and incorrect centring of
text on plots. I spent a long time debugging this and have now filed a gcc
bug report on the way clipTextCode is compiled.

It is possible to get a build that does not crash by compiling
src/main/{engine.c,graphics.c} and src/modules/X11/devX11.c without 
optimization, but I do not believe those are the only trouble spots, as
diffing postscript output against that produced on a build with gcc 3.2
shows further discrepancies.

The safest course of action seems to be to avoid gcc 3.2.1/2 on 
Sparc Solaris (and perhaps on other Sparc OSes).

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595