[R-pkg-devel] CMake on CRAN Systems

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 1/17/24 08:37, Sameh Abdulah wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> We recently encountered an installation issue with our package on CRAN. We've been depending on CMake, assuming it is readily available by default, but it appears to be only available on the M1mac system but not on the others. Should we include the CMake installation within our package?

Re Windows, see the documentation:

https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/howto-R-devel.html
https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/howto-R-4.3.html

cmake executable is available. But another issue is how well maintained 
are the cmake configuration files to find the software, etc.

You have most control when you specify the libraries for linking 
explicitly by yourself (and use just make/Makevars files), even though 
this can sometimes require manual changes for newer versions of Rtools 
(some libraries change linking often, most don't). This is the common 
way to do it (see the documentation).

You can also use pkg-config with the latest Rtools, and pkg-config is 
used internally by MXE, which provides some testing, and I've manually 
fixed a number of issues not detected by that testing. The advantage of 
pkg-config is that you don't have to specify the libraries yourself and 
it should reduce the need for updating your Makevars on Rtools updates. 
At the same time, it is much more likely to work than cmake, yet you 
could still easily run to issues, typically some dependency omitted.

I would not use cmake for an R package on Windows.

Tomas

>
> We encountered another issue with OpenMP, but we managed to resolve it by consulting the manual.
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://cran-archive.r-project.org/web/checks/2024/2024-01-12_check_results_MPCR.html__;!!Nmw4Hv0!1cg5mCeLOB9fBslqbEGB1S0_MEcOLMjk6m4hpfWDyXErAlWtm82xz9ZUU3aQ3q6jkXZBM2tNhUp3EI3JmigE4EvCLlrC$<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/cran-archive.r-project.org/web/checks/2024/2024-01-12_check_results_MPCR.html__;!!Nmw4Hv0!1cg5mCeLOB9fBslqbEGB1S0_MEcOLMjk6m4hpfWDyXErAlWtm82xz9ZUU3aQ3q6jkXZBM2tNhUp3EI3JmigE4EvCLlrC$>
>
>
>
> Best,
> --Sameh
>