[R] I am surprised (and a little irritated)

[François Pinard]

>[Tom Backer Johnsen]
>> [...] I've understood that RPM's are somewhat like installing 
>> programs on Windows, so that was downloaded and started with YAST.  
>> [...] Then I discover to my big surprise that the readme file says 
>> that I need to have eight installed packages.  Then it says "Most of 
>> them are included in a standard install".  [...] someone should get 
>> the OpenSuse people to include R in the installation.

[Gabor Csardi]

>I'm irritated as well. Your email should go to some suse mailing list, 
>this is a suse problem, it has (almost) nothing to do with R.

We are running regular (Pro?) SuSE systems at various distributions 
levels on a flurry of machines, but have no experience with OpenSuse, 
however, and install R from sources on these machines wherever needed.
My notes say that *I* should pay attention to have the following 
packages pre-installed, besides those which are already usual for us:

   gcc-fortran, libjpeg-devel, readline-devel, tcl-devel, tk-devel

I'm not sure about tk-devel.  But these are all available on the CDs.

R installation from sources goes surprisingly well for us, using SuSE.  
"surprisingly" is an euphemism here, "astonishingly" is more proper, 
given the size and complexity of R sources, components, and all release 
engineering.  I'm always quite impressed that such software works!  
There is a tremendous amount of work behind a successful distribution, 
which many of us do not suspect enough! :-)  It forces admiration.

-- 
François Pinard   http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca