[Rd] How to build R without support for translations?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 7:00 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 21 February 2017 at 18:45, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> | In Section 'Localization of messages' of R Installation and
> | Administration (R 3.3.2), it says:
> |
> |    "R can be built without support for translations, but it is enabled
> | by default."
> |
> | How can this be done?  Is this an option to 'configure', which I then
> | failed to identify, or via some environment variable setting?
>
> To a first approximation:  ensure configure fails that sub-tests by not
> having the corresponding -dev package.  More elaborately, turn the
> corresponding configure variable to 'no'.

To identify and manually disable / fail all relevant configure tests
was the answer I feared.

>
> | My objective is to get an R installation (on Linux) that is as small
> | as possible.
>
> I considered playing that game a couple of years ago and decided that it is
> more or less a waste of time: as good as 'R the interpreter' is, the real
> added value (at least to me) comes from the *incredible* power supplied by
> the *massive* number *perfectly well working add-on* packages from CRAN.
>
> Which nixes the idea of a minimal size. R really is /usr/bin/R plus whatever
> you want from CRAN.  So for you, what use in reducing R by 10% if you can't
> add the 'future' package?  Not to mention that many packages may need a
> compiler, or a beast like BH, or ...

I'm aware this question comes up once in a while.  One immediate
interest is running R on Amazon Lambda, which only allows for
deploying a 50 MB ZIP file / 250 MB uncompressed
(http://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/limits.html). So, an
obvious ~7 MB reduction can be valuable / critical there.

Thanks,

Henrik

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