[Rd] Bug: Issues on Windows with SFN disabled
Tomas Kalibera
tomas.kalibera at gmail.com
Fri Dec 8 13:14:21 CET 2017
On 12/07/2017 06:15 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> On 7 December 2017 at 17:56, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
> |
> | An update on this. Writing R Extensions does not recommend to have a
> | space character in R_HOME. This means that on Windows one either should
> | have SFN enabled (which is still the common case), or install into a
> | directory that does not have a space in its name (so specifically not
> | into "Program Files"). This recommendation unfortunately needs to stay
> | for now.
> |
> | WRE recommends that Makefiles are written to be robust against space
> | characters inside R_HOME. All path names passed from a Makefile to the
> | shell should be quoted at least if they include R_HOME. Make "include"
> | directives should not be used on path names that are derived from
> | R_HOME, but one should instead use the "-f" option multiple times when
> | recursively invoking make. Maintainers of packages that use "include"
> | with R_HOME have been notified. Unfortunately, the number of packages
> | that do not quote pathnames with R_HOME in Makefiles is rather large, so
> | fixing will take some time.
> |
> | Currently, R-devel should build fine on Windows with R_HOME including
> | space, including all base and recommended packages, and tests for these
> | packages should pass even though this is not regularly tested. If you
> | find a case when this does not work, please submit a bug report.
>
> Why does the Windows installer default to using a directory with spaces?
It's a convention on Windows and I guess there may be problems with
permissions on other directories. My hope is we can make R work reliably
without SFN just in time before SFN become disabled by default, after
all, quoting pathnames in Makefiles (or shell scripts for that matter)
is a good practice anyway and avoiding "include" is not a big problem as
very few packages are affected.
But thanks for opening this and I am happy for insights from any Windows
experts on the issue. I would not want to violate the convention for all
users when just few of them have SFN disabled, and as I hope this will
be fixed on R/packages side, but maybe the installer could at least
detect the problem (when "Program Files" or another specified target
directory did not have a short name). Or perhaps also suggest a
different default. Certainly R could print a warning when it starts.
Tomas
> Related (but moderately more advanced), why does R still install "everything"
> under one (versioned) directory so that uninformed users on upgrade "miss"
> all previously installed packages?
>
> Why not (with space for exposition here, imagine s/ // everywhere below)
>
> $SOMEROOTDIR / R /
> R-a.b.c/ # before
> R-a.b.d/ # d > c, here
> site-library/ # with .libPaths having this preset?
>
> I don't really care as I manage to work mostly / entirely on another OS, but
> I just don't understand why we do not put two and two together. But I am
> likely unaware of some salient issues.
>
> In any event, I appreciate the thankless work of those taking care of Windoze
> (ie Tomas, Jeroen, Duncan (now ex-officio), Brian, ...)
>
> Dirk
>
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