[R-SIG-Mac] RQuantLib missing binaries

[Kyle Matoba]

Hello Professor Ripley,

I see.  Yes, I failed to compile it myself on my CentOS machine
subsequent to sending this email also.  Very kind of you to get back
to me on this point.  I will see if I can get access to a Windows
machine and failing that, I will see about compiling QuantLib myself.
If I am successful I will remit this to the list.

Best,

Kyle


On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:15 PM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Jun 2010, Kyle Matoba wrote:
>
>> Just wondering if there was any plans to get this up and running again:
>>
>>
>> http://www.r-project.org/nosvn/R.check/r-release-macosx-ix86/RQuantLib-00install.html
>>
>> If not, I will compile it myself.
>
> You may not find it easy.  The issue is that RQuantLib depends on QuantLib,
> in fact on a recent version of QuantLib (later than the one in the current
> Fedora distribution, for example).  QuantLib is a large C++ suite of
> programs, and I've failed to compile it on Linux in the past, and when I
> have succeeded the package failed its own tests.
>
>> I don't see anything in the changelog to indicate that this is
>> deliberate.  Could whomever is compiling for macs look into this?
>
> It is done by Simon Urbanek's autobuiilder.  I don't see anything which
> indicates that it is not deliberate ....
>
> If you look at the packages which are not being built by the Mac
> autobuiilder you will see three main reasons why:
>
> (a) the package fails its tests, e.g. lme4
> (b) the package depends on other packages which are not available on the
> build machine, usually from BioC or OmegaHat.
> (c) the package depends on external software.
>
> RQuantLib is in category (c), and very few such packages are being built
> (not even Simon's own packages GDD and proj4).  If you look at the CRAN test
> logs, the only platform on which RQuantLib is being installed is 32-bit
> Windows (not even Debian on which it is developed) -- and that is because
> the author supplied a pre-compiled Windows version of QuantLib.
>
> I suspect you seriously underestimate the work which goes into providing R
> binary packages.  I know (I used to do it on Windows and still contribute
> there) just how thankless (literally and metaphorically) it is.
>
> --
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
>