On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>wrote:

> You need RGtk2 2.20.7 which is now on CRAN.  Others have seen this, but it
> has taken a while to track down the exact cause.
>
> The diagnosis was that ML used a recent GNU tar which created a tarball
> with hard links that R's untar was not prepared to deal with. We consider
> that is a bug in GNU tar, but untar() has been updated in R-patched to cope.
>
>
After a lot of back and forth with the GNU tar guys, it turns out they do
not consider this to be a bug. I had to refresh my knowledge of hard linking
to understand. A hard link is from a file name to the actual inode in the
file system. Typically every file has a single hard link (the name of the
file). The -h option used to resolve a symbolic link differently, based on
whether the hard link count of the target was 1 or >=2. This was practically
useful in my mind, because symlinks to any files without any explicitly
added hard links would become a regular file in the archive. They have now
dropped this distinction, calling it an inconsistency (apparently other
implementations of tar have never made such a distinction). So symlinks now
become hard links in the archive (as long as the target is in the archive).
We may need to keep the fix in untar() to handle this. Either way, RGtk2
2.20.7 should work now.

Thanks,
Michael


> If you have such a tarball, try setting the environment variable
> R_INSTALL_TAR to 'tar' (or whatever GNU tar is called on your system) when
> installing the tarball.
>
> For those packaging source packages: in the unusual event that your package
> sources contains symbolic (or even hard) links, don't use GNU tar 1.24 or
> 1.25.
>
>
> On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, Shige Song wrote:
>
>  Look forward to it.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Shige
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 8:45 AM, Michael Lawrence
>> <lawrence.michael@gene.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Please watch for 2.20.5 and let me know if it helps. Not really sure what
>>> is
>>> going on here, but someone else has reported the same issue.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Michael
>>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Shige Song <shigesong@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Dear All,
>>>>
>>>> I am trying to compile&install the package "RGtk2" on my Ubuntu 10.04
>>>> box. I did not have problem with earlier versions, but with the new
>>>> version, I got the following error message :
>>>>
>>>
> ...
>
> --
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/<http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/%7Eripley/>
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
>

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

