[R-sig-Fedora] WARNING you cannot build info or html versions of the R manuals

[Rolf Turner]

On 20/01/16 12:20, Tom Callaway wrote:
> On 01/18/2016 08:50 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
>> Okay; tried this.  The executive summary is:  It didn't work.
>
> I normally would charge a modest fee of a good bottle of liquor or a
> six-pack of craft beer for the following lesson, but in the spirit of
> easing your suffering, I shall do it once more at no charge. ;)

Well, if you ever make it to New Zealand, get in touch and I will shout 
you dinner and all the wine you can drink at a restaurant of your 
choice.  The effort you've put into this is way above and beyond the 
call of duty.

> Let's look at what didn't work.
>
>> In more detail:  I got a sequence of warnings
>>
>> warning: group mockbuild does not exist - using root
>
> Yep. This is safe to ignore. What RPM is saying here is that the user
> who originally built this package ("mockbuild") isn't on your system.
> "mockbuild" is the unprivileged user/group that the Fedora buildsystem
> uses to build packages. However, part of that warning is something you
> should not ignore:
>
> " - using root".
>
> You should not be building software as root. That path leads to terrible
> pain and destruction. When you're ready to install the software you've
> built, su to root, but not before.

Ah, errmmm, I'm at a loss.  I *didn't* su to root at all.  Ever.  The
warning said "using root" --- but I didn't, in any way, tell the 
rpmbuild command to do it's work as root.

What am I not understanding here?

This is kind of irrelevant anyhow since you've built for me all the 
stuff that I need.

So let's cut to the chase:

<SNIP>

> That said, since you've listened to all of this, I've installed a Fedora
> 17 VM instance on my laptop and built you the missing packages you need
> to build R fully featured:
>
> https://spot.fedorapeople.org/fedora17-R-deps/

Thank you for going to all this work.

However (as usual) I'm still at a bit of a loss.  I *think* that just a 
few more words of instruction will get me to where I need to be.

I went to the site that you specify and there found a list of 14 
packages (rpm-s) one of which is a ".src.rpm" with the others end just 
in ".rpm" with no ".src" before it.

OK.  Now what do I do?

Do I download each of these and install them, in the order that they are 
listed?  Or is there some other incantation that should be invoked?

I tried downloading the first rpm listed, id est

     info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64.rpm

and then did

     rpm -i info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64.rpm

but this gave me an error:

> error: can't create transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/.rpm.lock (Permission denied)

So I then tried:

     sudo rpm -i info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64.rpm

and got *some* action, but also got a plethora of messages:

> file /sbin/install-info from install of info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package info-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64
> file /usr/bin/info from install of info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package info-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64
> file /usr/share/info/info-stnd.info.gz from install of info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package info-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64
> file /usr/share/info/info.info.gz from install of info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package info-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64
> file /usr/share/man/man1/info.1.gz from install of info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package info-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64
> file /usr/share/man/man1/install-info.1.gz from install of info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package info-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64
> file /usr/share/man/man5/info.5.gz from install of info-6.0-2.fc17.1.x86_64 conflicts with file from package info-4.13a-16.fc17.x86_64

They don't say "error" but I am not sure what the implications are, so I 
stopped at that point in case I screw things up even further than I 
already have.

> There is a src.rpm in there too for texlive, you don't need to install
> it, I just included it because I had to make a minor fix in that package
> to reflect the dependencies available in Fedora 17 (but really only to
> install the texinfo-tex subpackage, which I don't think you need to
> build R... but still, better complete than not).

I didn't see anything that I could identify as a src.rpm for texlive. 
The one src.rpm that I see is

     texinfo-6.0-2.fc17.1.src.rpm

Is this what you mean?

Thanks again.  Hoping for further enlightenment.

cheers,

Rolf


-- 
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276