[R-sig-Fedora] R-devel going away

[Martyn Plummer]

On Thu, 2008-10-23 at 10:42 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-10-23 at 16:34 +0200, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> > Better solutions:
> > 
> > * add it to comps.xml
> > * move 'R' to R-core, and add 'R' which depends on 'R-core' +
> > 'R-devel'
> > 
> > 
> > > * The size of the R-devel is tiny, about 440K installed.
> > 
> > You miss its dependencies:
> > 
> > bzip2-devel
> > gcc-c++
> > gcc-gfortran
> > libICE-devel
> > libSM-devel
> > libX11-devel
> > libXmu-devel
> > libXt-devel
> > libjpeg-devel
> > libpng-devel
> > ncurses-devel
> > pkgconfig
> > readline-devel
> > tcl-devel
> > tetex-latex
> > texinfo
> > tk-devel
> 
> These are very good points, thanks Enrico. What would people think about
> doing the suggested R/R-core/R-devel split instead? Users would still be
> able to get everything with yum install R, it would meet the guidelines,
> and minimal installs with R can simply have R-core.
> 
> ~spot

Those dependencies are not correct, and I think I have to admit
responsibility for this.  I don't know what brainstorm I had when I put
these in. 

For a start, tetex-latex should  be a dependency of R, not R-devel,
since the "Rd2dvi" command included in the R RPM calls pdflatex (I can't
remember if it was Peter Dalgaard or Brian Ripley who pointed this out).

Apart from this, R records certain aspects of its build-time environment
in the file $RHOME/etc/Makeconf and these settings are used when
building packages.  If you want to ensure that *all* packages build
correctly, then you need to match the settings in this file. This would
require:

gcc
gcc-gfortran
gcc-c++
tcl-devel
tk-devel

There are also some JAVA* variables in Makeconf. However, unlike the
other variables, these can be modified post-installation so do not need
to be matched.

The Debian project has an "r-base-dev" package, which is payload free (I
believe) and only exists to ensure that the dependencies for package
development are satisfied.   In fact the R-devel RPMs distributed via
CRAN used to do something similar.

If you are unhappy about putting these last 5 dependencies in R, then
you could have a separate R-devel RPM that contains nothing (or just the
libR.pc file if you need a payload) but requires these packages.

Martyn



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