R-beta: INSTALL -- "RPROFILE"

Friedrich Leisch Friedrich.Leisch at ci.tuwien.ac.at
Mon Jun 22 17:21:55 CEST 1998


>>>>> On 22 Jun 1998 10:04:46 -0500,
>>>>> Douglas Bates (DB) wrote:

DB> Friedrich Leisch <Friedrich.Leisch at ci.tuwien.ac.at> writes:
>> >>>>> On 20 Jun 1998 01:14:36 +0200,
>> >>>>> Peter Dalgaard BSA (PDB) wrote:
>> 
PDB> Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:
>> >> 
Jim> It would also be nice if the proper options were given to mkdir for
Jim> installing libraries: every time a library is reinstalled (debugging),
Jim> mkdir now complains (twice) that it cannot create the directories
Jim> because they already exist.
>> >> 
>> >> You are right.  Fritz ?
>> 
PDB> That's "mkdir -p" but where do we have the offending commands? Is it
PDB> only in INSTALL.in (I'll fix those)?
>> 
>> We already had this once before ... just telling mkdir to ignore the
>> existing dirs is not sufficient, because re-installing a library
>> without first removing it is currently not clean.

>> I will look into automatically calling R REMOVE if the library already
>> exists. Will probably get to it this afternoon.

DB> I'm not sure that is the best thing to do.  In my experience the
DB> slowest part of installing large R libraries is creating the
DB> documentation files.  Especially when you make a small change in the
DB> source code, I have found that using
DB>  R INSTALL --no-docs ...  
DB> is much faster than going through the compilation of the documentation
DB> again.  We know that creating the documentation files is a slow
DB> process.  We have discussed the possibility of using a perl script to
DB> check if the documentation source file had changed at all before
DB> overwriting every file in the help, html, and latex directories.

DB> If the first thing that is done when installing a library is to remove
DB> any old copies, we are guaranteeing that the process will always be
DB> slow because of the creation of the help, latex, and html files.

DB> As of R-0.62.1 there is only one file in the R and libs
DB> subdirectories.  Those files will always be overwritten by the new
DB> versions.  The only danger in not removing the old library before
DB> installing a new version is retaining out-of-date files that should
DB> not be present in the data or the documentation directories.  It seems
DB> to be a small price to pay for not having to wait for all the
DB> documentation to be parsed every time you re-install the library.

I think the clean way to do this is include an option --no-remove to
INSTALL to prevent removal ... such that you have ``to know what you
do'' if you do an unclean INSTALL ...

Would that be OK for you?

.f


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