[Rd] Fwd: help building very old R

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 30 July 2018 at 05:35, David Hugh-Jones wrote:
| Hi guys,
| 
| Perhaps someone here can help.
| 
| I am trying to build versions of R 1 for the rcheology package (just
| arrived on CRAN).
| 
| For R prior to 1.5.0, I cannot configure support for tcl-tk.
| 
| I am building on Debian Woody (provided by Docker debian/eol) and have the
| following packages installed:
| r-base-dev tclx8.3-dev tk8.3-dev xvfb xbase-clients x-window-system-core
| 
| I download R source from http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-1 and run
| 
| ./configure --with-tcl-tk=yes
| --with-tcl-config=/usr/lib/tcl8.3/tclConfig.sh
|       --with-tk-config=/usr/lib/tk8.3/tkConfig.sh
| 
| These are the locations for the relevant tkConfig.sh and tclConfig.sh files.
| This gives output as follows:
| 
| R is now configured for x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
| 
|   Source directory:          .
|   Installation directory:    /usr/local
| 
|   C compiler:                gcc  -g -O2
|   C++ compiler:              c++  -g -O2
|   FORTRAN compiler:          g77  -g -O2
|   X11 support:               yes
|   Gnome support:             no
|   Tcl/Tk support:            no
|   R profiling support:       yes
|   R as a shared library:     no
| 
| And config.log reveals:
| configure:13099: checking for /usr/lib/tcl8.3/tclConfig.sh
| configure:13134: checking for /usr/lib/tk8.3/tkConfig.sh
| configure:13204: checking for /usr/include/tcl8.3/tcl.h
| configure:13214: gcc -E -I/usr/local/include conftest.c >/dev/null
| 2>conftest.out
| configure:13313: checking for /usr/include/tk8.3/tk.h
| configure:13323: gcc -E -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/X11R6/include
| -I/usr/include
| /tcl8.3 conftest.c >/dev/null 2>conftest.out
| configure:13319: /usr/include/tk8.3/tk.h: No such file or directory
| configure: failed program was:
| #line 13318 "configure"
| #include "confdefs.h"
| #include </usr/include/tk8.3/tk.h>
| configure:13348: checking for /usr/include/tk.h
| configure:13358: gcc -E -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/X11R6/include
| -I/usr/include
| /tcl8.3 conftest.c >/dev/null 2>conftest.out
| configure:13354: /usr/include/tk.h: No such file or directory
| configure: failed program was:
| #line 13353 "configure"
| #include "confdefs.h"
| #include </usr/include/tk.h>
| configure:13385: checking for tk.h
| configure:13389: tk.h: No such file or directory
| 
| In fact, tk.h is in  /usr/include/tcl8.3/ , despite the failed program
| compilation report.
| 
| R 1.5.0 and above work fine. Can anyone remember far back, if something
| changed in the configure script?
| 
| Alternatively, those who are feeling brave can download the Docker image
| creation scripts from github.com/hughjonesd/rcheology .

Have you considered the actual Debian packages from "way back then" ?
Debian has this nifty snapshot archive where you can get old binaries:

  http://snapshot.debian.org/

For (source package) r-base we see 3.5.1 all the way down to 0.61.2

  http://snapshot.debian.org/package/r-base/

Alternatively, the package itself is now (finally, my bad) in a git repo
which goes back to 0.61.2 as well (using snapshot as the feeder)

  https://salsa.debian.org/edd/r-base/commits/master

Hth,  Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org