[R] Redhat compilers and lme4 with R-2.4.0

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2006, Stefan Grosse wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley schrieb:
>> 
>> Not surprising: you have not compiled R with -std=gnu99 to allow C99 
>> features, as recommended in the R-admin manual, and selected by default. 
>> (Comment to Doug Bates: it is probably better still to write in C90 if you 
>> can.)
>> 
>> This seems to be a problem with the flags used to build the FC5 RPMs.
>> I think you can circumvent it by adding
>> 
>> PKG_CFLAGS=-std=gnu99
>> 
>> to lme4/src/Makevars.
>> 
>> 
>
> I am having the same problem on Fedora Core 5 with the 2.4.0 rpm from CRAN. 
> Update from lme4 0.9975-3 to lme4 0.9975-6 failed due to exactly the same 
> error message. I would have expected the cran rpm is compiled according to 
> the R-admin guide...?

But it is not, as you can check by looking at R_HOME/etc/Makeconf.  (That 
seems like basic homework to be done _before_ posting: I can only know 
that because I happen to have that RPM installed on my own machine.)

My understanding is that rpmbuild is overridding the R defaults, and needs 
to be overridden in turn. I've copied in Martyn Plummer, who will know for 
sure what happens and what needs to be done about this.

>From offline correspondence, I gathered that the next lme4 revision will 
revert to C90, which would resolve this.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595