[Rd] Re: [R] installing on alpha (tru64)

[M. Edward Borasky]

I dug up the scripts I used to build R on a Tru64 system. Notes are
given below. Please note that these were done with R-1.8.1 source. They
may not work with later versions.

1. Path settings: our system uses System V emulation. IIRC this is an
extra cost option and not the default. In any event, the paths for such
emulation were at the head (first seen) of the PATH.

2. The version of Perl we default to is outdated. The first thing I did
was to build Perl 5.8.0. This does work with the existing Tru64 tools.

3. Then I built the GNU toolchain. First was make-3.80, then
coreutils-5.0, then binutils-2.13.2.1, then gcc-2.95.3. I had some
difficulties with gcc 3.x, so I decided to drop back to good ol' 2.95.
If the folks on this list want to disagree with this choice, I'll be
happy to accept their arguments, although I don't have any reason to
test that option any more.

4. Given all that, and the appropriate PATH settings, of course, I then
built R 1.8.1. The specific configure options I used were

--build=alpha-dec-osf4.0f --target=alpha-dec-osf4.0f --without-blas
--with-x --disable-R-profiling

The resulting R passed "make check". Getting to this point took me
several days, given the number of special situations our usage of Tru64
had going for it. A more vanilla or more recent Tru64 might be more
painless. And I was only able to get the X part of the build to work on
one machine; the others had libraries missing. As I noted before, the
project that inspired this is now dormant and it's unlikely I'll attempt
to deal with a more recent R or GCC.