[Rd] TeXmacs and R 2.0.0

[Prof Brian Ripley]

We don't know what `TeXmacs' is, but this looks like an R package.
I suspect more accurately you are talking about the R plug-in for
TeXmacs, at

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/plugins/statistics.en.html#r

Now, it seems that the TeXmacs team have not read `Writing R Extensions', 
for their *source* distribution contains a *binary* distribution of an 
installed R package with DESCRIPTION file containing

Built: R 1.7.1; i686-pc-linux-gnu; 2003-09-24 17:40:45

They need to ensure that they distribute the package sources.  You ought 
to be able to recreate them from what is there.

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004, M. Edward Borasky wrote:

> I have encountered an issue with TeXmacs and R 2.0.0, and I've found a
> somewhat unsatisfying workaround. My apologies if this is old news to
> the R-Devel list.
>
> TeXmacs has the ability to start up an R session and copy the session
> input and output into a working document. The way it does this involves
> starting R and executing
>
>> library(TeXmacs,lib.loc="/usr/share/TeXmacs/plugins/r/r/")
>
> in the R session. The library was built with R 1.7.1, and hence will not
> work with R 2.0.0 or later.

It also will not work on any other platform than i686-linux.

> The workaround is (as "root"):
>
> 1. Edit
>
>   /usr/share/TeXmacs/plugins/r/r/TeXmacs/DESCRIPTION
>
> and remove the line at the bottom that starts with "Built:"
>
> 2. Type
>
>   R CMD build --force TeXmacs
>
> 3. Type
>
>   R CMD INSTALL -l `pwd` TeXmacs_0.1.tar.gz

Given that there are no suitably named files in the R directory, I don't 
think that will work correctly.

> My question is this: do I actually need to do the INSTALL, or is the
> build, followed by deleting the built package, enough? I've passed what
> I know so far on to the TeXmacs team; eventually they will incorporate
> some cleaner fix into their code, but I have no idea exactly how that
> will work, since they need to be able to work with older versions of R
> as well.

If it is distributed as a source package, it should work on all recent 
versions of R.

-- 
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