[R] Failure of update.packages()

[Jari Oksanen]

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 13:52 +0100, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> I M S White <iwhite at staffmail.ed.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > Can anyone explain why with latest version of R (2.0.1) on FC3, installed
> > from R-2.0.1-0.fdr.2.fc3.i386.rpm, update.packages() produces the message
> > 
> > /usr/lib/R/bin/Rcmd exec: INSTALL: not found.
> > 
> > Indeed /usr/lib/R/bin seems to lack various shell scripts (INSTALL,
> > REMOVE, etc).

> You need to install the R-devel package too:
> 1
> R-devel-2.0.1-0.fdr.2.fc3.i386.rpm 
> 
> The big idea is that this will suck in all the required compilers,
> libraries, and include files via RPM dependencies, but users with
> limited disk space may be content with the binaries of R+recommended
> packages. 
> 
This kind of problems were to be anticipated, weren't they? The great
divide between use-only and devel packages is a rpm packaging standard,
but not very useful in this case: it splits a 568K devel chip from a
15.4M chunk of base R. Moreover, you don't have a repository of binary
packages for Linux which means that not many people can use the 568K
saving in download times (saving in disk space is more considerable of
course). So are there plans for binary Linux packages for other distros
than Debian so that people could use the non-devel piece of R only?

cheers, jari oksanen
-- 
Jari Oksanen <jarioksa at sun3.oulu.fi>