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

[Roger Bivand]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Martyn Plummer wrote:

> 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.

I agree with Martyn. The user/developer distinction should be between 
people developing R and people using R - here the second group do need 
access to the header files to use contributed packages, a normal user 
activity. This is however in some degree conditional on having the 
same build train that was used to build the R base binary. People 
developing R base need much more than just the headers.

Roger

>
> Martyn
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no