[R-sig-Fedora] missing Rversion.h and Rconfig.h when installing RSQLite under FC8

[Martyn Plummer]

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 13:09 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 19:02 +0200, Martyn Plummer wrote:
> > Dear Han,
> > 
> > The short answer to your question is that you need to install the
> > R-devel package, which contains the header files.  This question comes
> > up a lot. Most people ask on R-help so I have to thank you for asking
> > here as it gives us a chance to discuss this.
> > 
> > The good news is that R 2.8.0 will produce a sensible error message
> > suggesting that you have a missing R-devel RPM. But the real question is
> > why are we splitting off the header files into a separate RPM at all? It
> > certainly isn't to save disk space:
> > 
> > [martyn at seurat i386]$ ls -l R-2.7.2-1.fc9.i386.rpm R-devel-2.7.2-1.fc9.i386.rpm 
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 martyn mock 26469726 2008-08-26 16:17 R-2.7.2-1.fc9.i386.rpm
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 martyn mock    92558 2008-08-26 16:17 R-devel-2.7.2-1.fc9.i386.rpm
> > 
> > Brian Ripley considers this to be a bug, and I have to say he has a
> > point.
> > 
> > I would very much prefer if the R-devel files were merged back into the
> > main R rpm. Would anyone from Fedora like to comment?
> 
> You do not need these files unless you're building something for R,
> thus, the average end-user does not need them. 

This is where we disagree. The average end-user needs to install
packages.  Although CRAN supports binary packages for Windows and Mac Os
X, it only provides source packages for Linux.

>From the conversations that Marc and I had at the UseR! conference with
Jose Matos, I understand that you plan to provide Fedora RPMs of R
packages. But you are still a long way from providing a full service.

There are currently 1533 packages/bundles on CRAN, not counting the
recommended packages that are already distributed with R. Of these
packages, 420 require to the R headers. Fedora only supplies RPMs for 9
of them.

That leaves 411 packages that fall between two stools. They cannot be
installed by the user using the built-in R functions and they cannot be
installed via yum.  If you also count the packages that depend on these
(directly or indirectly) you get a total of 607 packages, or 40% of
CRAN, which cannot be installed by a Fedora user.

> The -devel subpackage is
> correct for this case, and it matches the rest of Fedora.
> 
> Sorry, I don't agree that this is a bug, this is an intentional design
> design in Fedora that all of our packages follow.
> 
> ~spot

I understand that this is standard practice, not only in Fedora but also
in other Linux distributions.  But I think the user/developer
distinction has been misapplied.  Most people who want to install a
package would not consider themselves to be developers. They just need
to build a source package as a means to an end.

Martyn

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