[R-sig-Debian] [Rd] Multiple sub-architecture: linking issue

[Renaud Gaujoux]

On 12/06/2012 16:03, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> Because INSTALL can be used on directories and that won't work, because the installation will modify the content so you can't run it twice. Technically, it would work on tar balls, and I think there is now --merge-multiarch that will do it. I suspect that the reason to not make it default is that it takes twice as long so it is a bit annoying if you are installing in the development process (but that's just a guess).
>
> Cheers,
> Simon
>
>

Understood. I guess it would be possible (nice) to detect such special 
case where INSTALL is a directory.

I used install.packages('RCurl', libs_only=TRUE) to install RCurl from 
CRAN from the 64 bit R session after installing it on the 32 bit, and it 
worked perfectly.

I would say that when a user/admin installs a package she expects it to 
be available in all its R installations.
So to me it looks like package installations from anything except 
directories (repositories, tar balls) could be rather assumed to be 
multiarch installs by default, with the option of choosing a single 
architecture. This "install all" behaviour could possible be enabled 
with an option, for backward compatibility.

Renaud