[R-SIG-Mac] Installing R from source: "../i386/ldpaths: No such file or directory"

[Simon Urbanek]

On Oct 3, 2011, at 4:12 PM, Charlie Sharpsteen wrote:

> On Sunday, October 2, 2011 8:12:20 AM UTC-7, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> The framework installation uses `arch` to determine the default architecture which in your case is i386 but it is not installed. You can edit
> 
> /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/bin/R
> 
> and replace 
> : ${R_ARCH=/`arch`}
> with
> : ${R_ARCH=/x86_64}
> 
> The assumption is that if you use a framework the resulting R will be universal, but it your case it's not. I'll see if we can come up with something more robust ...
> 
> Cheers,
> Simon
> 
> 
> I run 10.6.8 with an x86_64 kernel and `arch` still returns i386 which is a bit misleading.

Yes, you can use `uname -m` to get the kernel preference.


> For the Homebrew package manager, we decide if 64 bit binaries are preferred by checking the return value of `/usr/sbin/sysctl -n hw.cpu64bit_capable`.
> 

Well, that is a bit misleading, too, because it assumes that 64-bit capable machines prefer 64-bit binaries, which is not always true (e.g. low-memory machines usually don't want the extra overhead).

The `arch` idiom was designed to tell PowerPC and Intel apart, it was not designed to detect preference between 32 and 64-bit - in fact 32-bit is more safe in that it will work anywhere (so far, I would not surprised if Apple changes that, too ;)).

Cheers,
Simon