[Rd] ANN/RFC: package providing TAB completion for readline-based R

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On 10/23/06, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 23 October 2006 at 16:51, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
> [... nice announcement trimmed ...]
> | There are a couple of things about which I would like some advice:
> |
> | (1) The package currently contains a very rudimentary configure script
> | which stops installation when readline is not found. I'm not sure if
> | this is portable enough. .../src/unix/sys-std.c has more sophisticated
> | conditional directives, but I don't know enough about this sort of
> | thing to interpret those. Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be
> | appreciated.
>
> littler has the same issue for getopt, R itself, R as a dynamic library,
> ....  So far, we are going with 'just bark and stop'.
>
> For rcompletion, I hope you simply stick with configure.  I don't like the
> trend of shipping everything again and again (Hi, Seth :)
>
> | (2) What's the recommended procedure to distribute this, given that
> | (a) it's not relevant on Windows (i.e. won't do anything even if it
> | could be installed) and (b) may or may not be relevant on Macs, some
> | of which apparently have a fake readline that doesn't support
> | completion?
>
> Again, I also wondered if littler should just pretend to be a CRAN package so
> that at least the update and compile mechanism works from R (given how we
> need re-runs of configure and make if something changes as we depend on
> compile-time 'hard' settings for littler as opposed to env. vars for R).
>
> The problem we are facing is that we're unsure how to get to
> /usr/(local/)/bin from update.packages() ...
>
> Given that you'll undoubtedly come up with something clever, Jeff and
> I will be sure to see if we can mimic it :)

Well, rcompletion is a proper package, the only issue is that it's
platform / environment dependent. I know there are other such
packages, I just don't know how they are dealt with.

I don't see how you can get around the /usr/bin problem for littler,
except by asking the user to manually do something like

ln -s /path/to/library/littler/bin/r /usr/local/bin/

which at least wouldn't have to be repeated on further upgrades if you
detect that the link exists.

-Deepayan