[R] R's configure on Fedora 17

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>
>>>>>     on Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:49:26 +0000 writes:

    > On 11/01/2013 01:50, Rolf Turner wrote:
    >> 
    >> Some while ago I posted a problem on this list concerning a failure of
    >> R CMD check on one of my packages that resulted from LaTeX being
    >> unable to find the "inconsolata" font.  This was under the Ubuntu OS.
    >> 
    >> This was solved, thanks to advice I got from this list, basically by
    >> doing
    >> 
    >> sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-extra
    >> 
    >> I am now (for reasons which I won't go into) running Fedora 17, on a
    >> different computer.  Now LaTeX cannot find the necessary inconsolata.sty
    >> file.
    >> 
    >> I googled around a bit, and an item I found led me to check whether I
    >> actually had texlive installed on my (new) system.  I hadn't!!!  So I did
    >> 
    >> sudo yum install texlive
    >> 
    >> and that seemed to work.  But then the item I'd found indicated that I
    >> should do
    >> 
    >> sudo yum install texlive-inconsolata, texlive-inconsolata-font
    >> 
    >> But I got:
    >> 
    >>> No package texlive-inconsolata, available.
    >>> No package texlive-inconsolata-font available.
    >> 
    >> I also tried
    >> 
    >> sudo yum install texlive-fonts-extra
    >> 
    >> with a similar result.
    >> 
    >> Can anyone give me a simple recipe as to how to get the inconsolata font
    >> and the associated inconsolata.sty?

    > Install texlive 2012.  The texlive version in Fedora (<= 17, and 17 is 
    > the current release with 18 having been delayed yet again) is many years 
    > out of date (2007: this is 2013!), and you will save yourself a lot of 
    > other problems.

Interesting.. Thank you Brian.

Just having my hands on a notebook with Fedora 17 on which I
would not want to spend much time (it's not mine; but I'll use
it in a course because it is dual boot Windows), I find that

  ../R/configure

*hangs* completely after printing the lines

......................
checking for install-info... /usr/sbin/install-info
checking for texi2dvi... /usr/bin/texi2dvi
checking for kpsewhich... /usr/bin/kpsewhich

both for R-patched and  R-devel

which seems  "not optimal" even with an outdated TeX setup.

The next line typically printed would be the search for unzip,
but I cannot imagine that it would hang there,
but rather when finishing the kpsewhich configuration part.

I'd like to help if to make R's  configure  more robust here...

Martin