[R-pkg-devel] portability question

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 20 December 2023 at 11:10, Steven Scott wrote:
| The Boom package builds a library against which other packages link.  The
| library is built using the Makevars mechanism using the line
| 
| ${AR} rc $@ $^
| 
| A user has asked me to change 'rc' to 'rcs' so that 'ranlib' will be run on
| the archive.  This is apparently needed for certain flavors of macs.  I'm
| hoping someone on this list can comment on the portability of that change
| and whether it would negatively affect other platforms.  Thank you.

Just branch for macOS.  Here is a line I 'borrowed' years ago from data.table
and still use for packages needed to call install_name_tool on macOS.  You
could have a simple 'true' branch of the test use 'rcs' and the 'false'
branch do what you have always done.  Without any portability concerns.

>From https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/blob/master/src/Makevars.in#L14
and indented here for clarity

        if [ "$(OS)" != "Windows_NT" ] && [ `uname -s` = 'Darwin' ]; then \
           install_name_tool -id data_table$(SHLIB_EXT) data_table$(SHLIB_EXT); \
        fi

Dirk

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