[R] Installing rgl package under Ubuntu

[Ivailo Stoyanov]

> On 15 December 2006 at 16:01, Ivailo Stoyanov wrote:
> | It seems that the r-base-dev package from the Ubuntu R backport doesn't
> | provide *all* the packages necessary to build add-on libraries.
> 
> Re-read and re-think what you wrote there: you expect the r-base-dev package
> to provide _all_ possible dependencies for _all_ possible packages. The
> Oracle of Delphi in a few lines of a meta file?
> 
> That obviously can't work.  r-base-dev tries to give you all you need to
> compile the _most common_ packages by providing essentially what R itself
> needs.  Specialised packages that use other, more arcane libraries and
> headers such as OpenGL are obviously not included.

Dirk,

I'm obviously not that deep into the Debian/Ubuntu package management,
and these considerations of mine should be taken just as what they are
-- considerations of a puzzled R user that has some problems with
building some package;)

> Lastly, I can only urge users of Debian and Ubuntu to remember that because
> we have _native_ packages on Debian and Ubuntu, we also have _native_
> Build-Depends information.  Had you tried
> 
> 	$ sudo apt-get build-dep r-cran-rgl
> 
> you might have gotten to the finish line much quicker.

Thanks a lot for this hint! It is very useful and I would definitely
hit the target much easier if I knew about that. The source for the
problem at hand have to be sought back in times when I relied too much
on the native cran-r-* packages, until I found that not everything is
available natively, so I started to install only the *-base packages
and to rely on the *-dev one to provide the dependencies I need to
build needed ad-on libraries manually. Actually, until now everything
went just fine this way, and I still appreciate much such cases that
fill my (still numerous) knowledge gaps.

> Regards, Dirk

Greets,
Ivailo