[R-sig-Debian] Ubuntu 8.10: Package installation fails (lf77blas problem)

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 8 December 2008 at 06:22, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| | gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include      -fpic  -g -O2 -c mboost.c -o mboost.o
| | gcc -std=gnu99 -shared  -o mboost.so mboost.o -lf77blas -latlas -lgfortran -lm 
| | -L/usr/lib/R/lib -lR
| | /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lf77blas
| | collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
| | make: *** [mboost.so] Error 1
| | ERROR: compilation failed for package 'mboost'
| | 
| | I guess this has something to do with the removal of the g77 package from Ubuntu
| | 8.10. Is there anything I can do short of compiling g77 and/or R myself?
| 
| It is not g77 itself (which was replaced by the improved gfortran), it
| appears to be a Fortran-built BLAS library for linear algebra. 
| 
| As I have no issue building these package, let's see where this library comes from:
| 
|   edd at joe:~$ locate libf77blas.so
|   /usr/lib/libf77blas.so
|   /usr/lib/libf77blas.so.3gf
|   /usr/lib/libf77blas.so.3gf.0
| 
| and hence 
|   
|   edd at joe:~$ dpkg -S /usr/lib/libf77blas.so
|   libatlas-base-dev: /usr/lib/libf77blas.so
| 
| So 'sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev' should fix it for you.  

Something may change in the build process.   R wants this 'f77blas' library
as it was encoded at configure time for R itself.  My Debian testing box has

   edd at ron:~$ grep blas /etc/R/Makeconf
   BLAS_LIBS = -lblas
   edd at ron:~$ 

which is correct: 'blas' is library that can be provide by atlas (fast, big
package) or refblas (smaller).  My Ubuntu system (using our CRAN binaries for
R) has

   edd at joe:~$ grep blas /etc/R/Makeconf
   BLAS_LIBS = -lf77blas -latlas
   edd at ron:~$ 

which is what you have, and which may have gotten there by accident. The odd
bit is that I had autobuilds of Debian R packages fail on just one minor
architecture (mips) for the same reason -- so maybe something changed at the
atlas library / compiler intersection.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.