[Rd] Provide both shlib and standard versions of R?

Martyn Plummer plummer at iarc.fr
Mon Jan 16 17:50:31 CET 2006


On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 00:45 -0600, Bo Peng wrote:
> > then either build your own with correct options or talk to your
> > distribution's packaging team.
> 
> It seems that my knowledge about this option is outdated.  When I
> first encountered this problem two years ago, the R/rpm distribution
> came with no libR.so. I was told that --enable-R-shlib would lead to
> 10% - 20% performance loss, and I had to re-compile R if I need to
> embed it.
> 
> So I guess performance is no longer an issue and shared libraries are
> provided as default on all platforms now? I certainly welcome this
> change and I apologize for my unfounded accusation to R.

What changed was that a sufficient number of people asked me to create
an RPM with the shared library and I changed my mind.  The aim of the
precompiled binaries is to satisfy most of the people most of the time,
and when I get repeated requests for the same feature, I have to bear
that in mind. People who require optimal performance can still compile
their own.

As for the idea of compiling two distinct binaries packages for R, I am
not especially keen, and not just out of laziness. The problem is that R
packages depend on libR.so, when it exists, so if you uninstall R with a
shared library and then install R without the shared library you get a
broken system.

You can look at the CAPABILITIES file in the same directory as the RPM
to see how it was compiled.

Martyn

> BTW, shouldn't --enable-R-shlib be yes by default during ./configure?.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bo
> 
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