[Rd] Building R with Cairo

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

| On 25/07/2013 20:35, Ben Warren wrote:
| >       I have been hacking on an R 2.15 build on an Ubuntu 10.4 box, and I do
| > not know how to debug R's error message regarding cairo "working".

Well -- there is a formally supported package so you could just use what I
use in the official Debian / Ubuntu package.  

Here is eg from my build-log for R 2.10.1-2 from early 2010 (to reflect your
Ubuntu 10.4 requirement) -- cutting and pasting from a grep for 'pango\|cairo':

Get:98 http://ftp.us.debian.org sid/main libcairo2 1.8.8-2 [508kB]
Get:100 http://ftp.us.debian.org sid/main libpango1.0-common 1.26.1-1 [103kB]
Get:104 http://ftp.us.debian.org sid/main libpango1.0-0 1.26.1-1 [298kB]
Get:115 http://ftp.us.debian.org sid/main libcairo2-dev 1.8.8-2 [584kB]
Get:116 http://ftp.us.debian.org sid/main libpango1.0-dev 1.26.1-1 [369kB]
[...]
Setting up libpango1.0-0 (1.26.1-1) ...
Setting up libcairo2-dev (1.8.8-2) ...
Setting up libpango1.0-dev (1.26.1-1) ..
[...]
checking whether pkg-config knows about cairo and pango... yes  
checking whether cairo including pango is >= 1.2 and works... yes  
  Additional capabilities:   PNG, JPEG, TIFF, NLS, cairo

These days, on current releases, it looks similar, apart from the fact that
we are of course using current release vesions.  As you probably should too.

Note that there is excellent support for pre-built binaries versions of Ubuntu
on CRAN as well, but I fear it only goes back as far currently supported
versions including the last long-term support as detailed in the README.

The r-sig-debian list is there for help on matters Debian/Ubuntu too.

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com