[R] R can't find gcc library that other programs can.

[Dr. David Kirkby]

R is used in the Sage project. R is building on Solaris 10 with SPARC 
processors. Until recently, I did not give it much more thought, as it appeard 
to build ok.

More recently someone noticed a test failure. It would appear a number of 
modules are not building (Matrix, class, mgcv, nnet, rpart, spatial, and 
survival) are all failing to build. But the R build process does not terminate. 
Is that intensional?

The way the build is failing is very odd indeed.

  ld.so.1: R: fatal: libgcc_s.so.1: open failed: No such file or directory


This is despite the location of libgcc_s.so is specified in LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and 
numerous other parts in Sage link to this library ok.

There's some information about the issue here

http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9201

Does anyone have any suggestions? In particular, do you consider the failure of 
one or more of those modules sufficiently serious that the build of R should 
stop, or do you consider some failures like this not so serious, and so it is 
right for the build to continue? (The reason I want to know this, is that we 
want to test for this failure in Sage. Depending on the seriousness of this, we 
make break the build if such a module fails, or we may decide to continue, and 
test things later, where a test failure would not stop Sage working.

Dave