[Rd] building with tcltk on Ubuntu 14.04

[Jari Oksanen]

On 28/05/2015, at 11:57 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:

>>>>>> Ben Bolker <bbolker at gmail.com>
>>>>>>    on Tue, 26 May 2015 11:13:41 -0400 writes:
> 
> 
>> False alarm.  Completely wiping out my build directory followed by
> 
>> ../R-devel/configure --with-tcl-config=/usr/lib/tclConfig.sh
>> - --with-tk-config=/usr/lib/tkConfig.sh; make
> 
>> seems to work.  (My fault for assuming repeated cycles of
>> ./configure; make would actually do the right thing ...)
> 
>> There seems to be a corollary of Clarke's Law ("any sufficient
>> advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") that says that
>> any sufficiently complex software system may *not* be magic, but it's
>> just easier to treat it as though it is ...
> 
>> Thanks for the offer of help ...
> 
> I also run several computers on Ubuntu 14.04
> and never had to anything special, I mean *no*  
> --with-tcl-...  or --with-tk-....
> where ever needed for me on 14.04 or earlier Ubuntu's... so I do
> wonder how you got into problems at all.
> 
I also have the same problem with Ubuntu (at least in 14.04, now in 15.04): ./configure does not find tcl/tk without --with-tcl-… and --with-tk-… 

They are in quite normal places, but still need manual setting. Currently I use something like --with-tcl-config=/usr/lib/tclConfig.sh --with-tk-config=/usr/lib/tkConfig.sh

I need these explicit switches only when configure is overwritten. Normal compilation with ./configure works OK and finds Tcl/Tk, but a couple of times per year the configure seems to change so much that I need to use these switches. I have had this problem a couple of years. 

If I need to guess, I do something wrong and against instructions, and therefore I won't complain.

Cheers, Jari Oksanen