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

[Dan Tenenbaum]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:37 PM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> Sorry, it appears that --merge-multiarch never got released except for
> Windows.  We can certainly finish that off.
>

We would *greatly* appreciate that!

Thank you very much.

Dan


>
> On 06/03/2012 06:31, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Prof Brian Ripley
>> <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On 06/03/2012 01:24, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>> That's my understanding too -- a small list of such packages is already
>>> known to INSTALL.
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Eh?  The recommended approach, INSTALL --merge-multiarch, _is_ part of R.
>>>  Although I rarely use it on Macs, AFAIK it works equally well there as
>>> on
>>> Windows.  And install.packages() takes arguments to be passed to INSTALL
>>> via
>>> INSTALL_opts .
>>>
>>
>> I never knew that --merge-multiarch was available for Macs. I tested
>> it and it seems to work.
>> I assumed that it was not available for Macs because it appears in the
>> "Windows only" section of R CMD INSTALL --help on my R (R version
>> 2.15.0 alpha (2012-03-02 r58567).
>>
>> Perhaps --merge-multiarch can be moved out of the "Windows" only
>> section of R CMD INSTALL --help?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dan
>>
>>
>>>
>>>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> We are not so far off that, but can only workaround _some_ of the strange
>>> things package maintainers do.  For example, all but 0.5% of CRAN
>>> packages
>>> which install at all install 'out of the box' on Windows: the exceptions
>>> need --multi-arch.  On a Mac the figure appears to be 1-2%.
>>>
>>> My experience is that there is a _tiny_ small proportion of R users
>>> installing from source on systems with multiple architectures who care
>>> about
>>> more than one architecture.  (It is a long while since I used 32-bit R on
>>> Windows, Mac or Linux except as an R developer to test things.) And I
>>> think
>>> most of those people are knowledgeable enough to write their own scripts
>>> to
>>> cover the exceptions.
>>>
>>> --
>>> 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
>
>
>
> --
> 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