[Rd] Perils of R_LIBRARY_PATH

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Prof Brian Ripley writes:

> The R front end sets (via etc/ldpath) R_LIBRARY_PATH, including 
> R_JAVA_LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  Perhaps the later is too obliging, as I've just 
> be caught by it in a way that took me a while to track down.

> One of my machines has a Sun jdk1.6.0* JDK installed, and as a result
> we have

> ${R_JAVA_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${JAVA_HOME}/lib/amd64/server:${JAVA_HOME}/lib/amd64:
> ${JAVA_HOME}/../lib/amd64}

> What I was not aware of was that the Sun JDK contains Gtk+ libraries such 
> as cairo and pango, and those were older than the ones whose headers I 
> had compiled against which eventually resulted in a crash.

> It seems to be an issue only for a JDK: perhaps Simon can tweak his 
> incantations to use only the JRE library path (and avoid the 
> '../lib/amd64' above)?

Along with doing this, can we perhaps change JAVA_HOME to something like
R_JAVA_HOME?  Apparently some applications require JAVA_HOME to be set
which in turn overrides the configured values for R ...

Best
-k