[Rd] R 2.1.1 slated for June 20

[Martyn Plummer]

On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 17:07 -0500, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 23:52 +0200, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> > Marc Schwartz <MSchwartz at mn.rr.com> writes:
> > 
> > > On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 14:57 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > The next version of R will be released (barring force majeure) on June
> > > > > 20th, with beta versions available starting Monday.
> > > > >
> > > > > Please do check them on your system *before* the release this time...
> > > > 
> > > > Some things which it would be particularly helpful to have tested:
> > > 
> > > 
> > > > - Bleeding-edge OSes, e.g. anyone running Fedora Core 4 test 3?  (These
> > > >    often show up problems with bugs in the pre-release versions of
> > > >    components such as X11 and compilers.)
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Just as a quick heads up, I installed FC4 Release ("Stentz") late
> > > yesterday.
> > > 
> > > R (Version 2.1.1 beta (2005-06-14)) compiles fine using:
> > > 
> > > $ gcc --version
> > > gcc (GCC) 4.0.0 20050519 (Red Hat 4.0.0-8)
> > > 
> > > and make check-all passes with no problems.
> > > 
> > > I have also installed all CRAN packages that do not require other 3rd
> > > party drivers, etc. and there were no observed errors in those cases.
> > > 
> > > So far, so good.
> > > 
> > > If anything comes up, I will post a follow up.
> > > 
> > > Best regards,
> > > 
> > > Marc Schwartz
> > 
> > Yep. Just tried the same on AMD64 (I had a bit of a fight converting
> > my SuSE setup -- FC4 is quite unhappy about ReiserFS for some reason).
> > A couple of f95 warnings whooshed by during the compile, that was all.
> > 
> > By the way, I noticed that you can now "yum install R R-devel" and get
> > everything straight from Fedora Extras.
> 
> Yep. Tom "Spot" Callaway is the FE maintainer for R.

I had a look at his RPM last night.  It includes a patch for gcc4, which
fails to build R with the fairly aggressive optimizations used by
rpmbuild. ("-O2 -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2" will reproduce the bug, IIRC, but
I'm not upgrading my work PC just yet, so I can't be sure).  I folded
this into R-patched.  It's a shame he didn't send a bug report or, if he
did, I missed it.

I also note he is using the patch that sets LANG=C, which is obsolete
now that R supports utf-8 locales.  I'll write to him (cc Marc) to let
him know about these changes.

The RedHat RPMS also use the shared library version of R.  I've been
thinking about making this change myself, despite the substantial speed
penalty, since I've seen a growing number of people recompiling to get
the shared library.  The Red Hat choice forces my hand though: I don't
want people upgrading from their R 2.1.0 to my R 2.1.1 and finding their
installed packages don't work anymore.  The $64,000 question is how many
people are going to care about that 15-20% decrease in speed. Speak up
now if it concerns you.

> A lot of things for FC 4 have been moved to Extras and there are of
> course new things (like R) there as well. The restrictions on non-GPL
> components is still there, so things like MP3 functionality is available
> via third party repos such as FreshRPMS, Livna, etc.
> 
> This was a "balancing" act between trying to reduce (manage) the size of
> the main distro and reducing real or perceived redundancies in packages.
> 
> So, for example:
> 
> 1. Include OO.org in Core, but move Gnumeric to Extras
> 
> 2. Include Emacs in Core, but move XEmacs to Extras
> 
> Needless to say, that resulted in "emotional" discussions.

This underscores the fact Fedora, despite claiming to be a community
project, is essentially Red Hat's rolling beta programme, and so must be
more focused and less inclusive than Debian.  (Just an observation. I
don't want to start a discussion on FOSS politics)

Martyn

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