[Rd] make hanging during compile of r-patched/R-devel on Fedora Core 3

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 4 May 2005, Marc Schwartz wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 13:56 +0100, Gavin Simpson wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On a new Dell laptop, with a fresh FC3 installation (with latest updates
>> applied) I am experiencing make hanging consistently after/during
>> building grDevices. This happens when using the configure flag
>> --with-lapack (I have the LAPACK rpm distributed with FC3 installed).
>> The last two lines of output are:
>>
>> make[5]: Leaving directory
>> `/home/gavin/R/devel/build/src/library/grDevices/src'
>> make[4]: Leaving directory
>> `/home/gavin/R/devel/build/src/library/grDevices/src'
>> hang here
>>
>> There are no errors or warnings printed to the console.
>>
>> The same thing happens with r-patched. Both source trees were checked
>> out using subversion.
>>
>> If I remove the configure flag for lapack, r-patches and r devel both
>> build fine. I'm not sure where to look for error messages or to diagnose
>> the problem. Has anyone experienced a similar problem? Where should I
>> look for any errors/logs? Any other suggestions?
>
> Gavin,
>
> FWIW, I can duplicate this behavior on my Dell 5150 w/ FC3 using the r-
> patched tarball from 2005-05-03.
>
> I thought that perhaps this might be related to the use of the nVidia
> proprietary driver, but temporarily going back to the 'nv' driver did
> not resolve the problem.
>
> Thus, I am unable to provide more information as to the etiology of the
> problem other than to point to some of the references in the r-admin
> manual starting on page 19 regarding linear algebra.
>
> Perhaps there is a problem with the FC3 LAPACK.

In any case, we do not recommend an external LAPACK unless it is 
essential.  There are far too many buggy ones about, and there is no 
performance gain in using someone else's compile of a nearly identical 
code base.  Is

   Provision is made for using an external LAPACK library, principally to
   cope with BLAS libraries which contain a copy of LAPACK (such as
   @code{libsunperf} on Solaris and @code{vecLib} on Mac OS X).
   However, the likely performance gains are thought to be small (and may
   be negative), and the default is not to search for a suitable LAPACK
   library.

   If you do use @option{--with-lapack}, be aware of potential problems
   with bugs in the LAPACK 3.0 sources (or in the posted corrections to
   those sources).  ....

not enough warning?

-- 
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