[R] Status of Rmpi--Good with tweaks

[Ross Boylan]

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 18:26, Ross Boylan wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 17:35, Luke Tierney wrote:
> > The serialize package should no longer be needed since the
> > functionality is now in R itself.  I haven't run snow with a new
> > version of Rmpi newer than 0.4-4; with that version things worked on
> > my systems the last time I tried.  We need to revize the paper you
> > cite; when we get to that we'll hopefully have a chance to give a
> > newer version of Rmpi a go.
> > 
> > Best,
> > 
> > luke
> 
> I got 0.4-6 to work, with one tweak to eliminate the loading of
> serialize and one fix of my own setup.
> 
> I changed the .First.Lib code in Rmpi to be
>     if (!exists("serialize") && !require(serialize))
> 	stop("serialize package cannot be loaded. Exit")	
> 
> !exists("serialize") && is new.  This is effort to check if the
                                          ^an   
> serialize function exists (R 1.8) and skip loading the library in that
> case.  Since there are various ways this might be fooled, perhaps an
> explicit check of the R version would be better.
> 
> I'm also not sure if the R packaging mechanism makes this easy, or
"this" refers to the modification to the .First.Lib that I made.
> autogenerates it.  This is a bit of a tricky situation, since serialize
> is required for some versions of R but should not be used for the most
> recent.
> 
> I suspect that without this the cluster would not come up because Rmpi
> would not load properly.  I have not tested that.