[R] issue with odfWeave running on Windows XP; question about installing packages under Linux

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I also have a problem using odfWeave on Windows XP with R > R2.11.1. odfWeave fails, giving mysterious error messages. (Not quite the same as yours, but similar. I sent the info to Max Kuhn privately, but did not get a response after two tries.) My odfWeave reporting system worked fine prior to R2.12 and then the same code that ran fine under R2.11.1 stopped working. Using the very same machine and running the very same code under R2.11.1 it still runs fine today. So, something is not quite right with odfWeave on Windows XP for R > R2.11.1, and I don't know what it is. My "solution" is to keep R2.11.1 around until it can be resolved.

Eric



----- Original message -----
From: "Cormac Long" <clong150 at googlemail.com>
To: r-help at r-project.org
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 10:45:06 +0100
Subject: [R] issue with odfWeave running on Windows XP; question about installing packages under Linux

Good morning R community,

I have two questions (and a comment):
1)
A problem with odfWeave. I have an odf document
with a table that spans multiple pages. Each cell in the table is
populated using \sexpr{<R stuff>}. This worked fine on my
own machine (windows 7 box using any R2.x.y, for x>=11) and
on a colleagues machine (Windows XP box running R2.11.1).
However, on a third machine (Windows XP box running R2.12.0
or R2.13.0), odfWeave fails with the following error:
    Error in parse(text = cmd) : <text>:1:36: unexpected '>'
    1: GLOBAL_CONTAI<text:soft-page-break/>
A poke around in the unzipped odt file reveals the culprit:
    \Sexpr{GLOBAL_CONTAI<text:soft-page-break/>NER$repDat$Dec[i]}
which should read
    \Sexpr{GLOBAL_CONTAINER$repDat$Dec[i]}

The page break coincides with where the table overruns from
one page to the next.

Now, if this was a constant error across all machines, that
would be annoying, but ok. My questions are:
   a) Can anyone think of a sensible suggestion why has this
       happened only on one machine, and not on other machines?
   b) Is there any way of handling such silent xml modifications
      (apart from odfTable, which I have only just bumped into, or
      extremely judicious choice of table construction, which is
      tedious and unreliable)?

2)
When installing some packages on linux (notably RODBC and XML),
you need to ensure that you linux distro has extra header files installed.
This is a particular issue in Ubuntu. The question is: is there any way
that a package can check for necessary external header files and issue
suitable warnings? For example, if you try to install RODBC on Ubuntu
without first installing unixodbc-dev, the installation will fail with the
error:
    configure: error: "ODBC headers sql.h and sqlext.h not found
which is useful, but not particularly suggestive of requiring unixodbc-dev


A further comment on odfWeave: odfWeave uses system calls to
zip and unzip when processing the odt documents. Would it not
be a good idea for the odfWeave package to check for the presence
of zip and unzip utilities and report accordingly when trying to install?
By default, Windows XP boxes do not have these utilities installed
(installing Rtools does away with this problem).


Many thanks in advance,
Dr. Cormac Long.

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