[Rd] Detecting development environment

[Hadley Wickham]

>> Is there a straight-forward, cross-platform way of determining if a
>> user has all the tools needed to develop R packages (i.e. gcc etc)?
>> It doesn't need to be 100%, but should give a rough idea.  One idea I
>> had was simply to see if system("R CMD install --help") worked.
>>
>
> That's not really checking pretty much anything (even if you used INSTALL ;)) since all it does is to run R.

Well I guess it checks that you have your path set up right.  But this
is why I asked ;)

> More reasonable quick check may be R CMD SHLIB, though, since that involves both make and gcc:
>
> echo 'void foo(int *bar) { *bar=1; }' > foo.c && R CMD SHLIB foo.c
>
> And you could even check feasibility with something like
>
> dyn.load(paste("foo",.Platform$dynlib.ext,sep=''))
> stopifnot(.C("foo",0L)[[1]] == 1L)

Perfect - thanks!

Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/