[R-SIG-Mac] Installing packages from source for all installed sub-architectures

[Simon Urbanek]

Dan,

On Mar 5, 2012, at 7:09 PM, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Are there plans to modify install.packages() on Mac so that if
> type="source", the package is installed for all installed
> sub-architectures?
> 
> This works for Windows.
> 
> Currently,
> install.packages("mypkg", type="source")
> **may** do the right thing, depending on what type of native code the
> package has, whether if has a configure script., etc, but there's no
> guarantee.
> 

The same is true for Windows - to my best knowledge the rules are the same on all platforms -- Makefile or configure prevent a package from being built for more than one architecture, because they may modify the sources in-place and thus the package can only be built once. The only difference I'm aware of is that some Windows packages use configure.win for things other than configuration, so binary maintainers may choose to ignore those but that is not the default AFAIK. 

Cheers,
Simon


> I might add that even installing a binary is not guaranteed to give
> you .so files for all sub-architectures. CRAN and Bioconductor create
> multi-arch binaries, but other package distributors may not do this,
> in fact, they likely won't, since the procedure for generating such
> binaries is not part of R and is therefore not documented as such.
> 
> There are of course ways to work around this. But it would be nice not
> to have to work around it, and it would be very nice if a single
> command could install a package (and, importantly, all its
> dependencies) from source for all available architectures.
> 
> Thanks!
> Dan
> 
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