[R-SIG-Mac] Problems to install a package

[Simon Urbanek]

Sorry, I thought it was obvious so I didn't elaborate in more detail - our Mavericks compiler binary (gfortran-4.8) itself is using more advanced instruction set so it doesn't work on older CPUs (C2D as it appears). It's likely something to do with gmp/mpfr since those are the only ones that use hand-coded assembler instructions and they picked the one for the host CRAN machine with is a Mac Pro (Xenon). It doesn't have an effect on the compiled result since the flags govern that - so the compiled packages will work just fine on old hardware.

Given that anyone with older hardware should simply be able to use the Fortran from CRAN I didn't think it could spawn such a long thread ;). After all, the underlying GNU Fortran is the same anyway.

Cheers,
Simon



> On Aug 3, 2015, at 7:59 AM, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I have now tried doctoring $RHOME/etc/Makeconf to use a MacPorts build of gfortran-4.8 that I had lying around, and lo and behold: It does source installs of nleqslv, geigen, QZ, rms with no trouble at all.
> 
> So I think the finger is pointing at the binaries on r.research.att.com/libs.
> 
> -pd
> 
> On 03 Aug 2015, at 11:26 , peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 01 Aug 2015, at 11:40 , peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 01 Aug 2015, at 07:34 , Berend Hasselman <bhh at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 31-07-2015, at 22:14, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 31 Jul 2015, at 21:36 , Berend Hasselman <bhh at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On 31-07-2015, at 20:46, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> On 31 Jul 2015, at 12:33 , Timothy Bates <tim.bates at ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> This happened for me too: that Intel Core 2 is just too old for the compiler.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> I used it as a stimulus to buy a new laptop… As a bonus, everything is ~10x faster
>>>>>>>> Best, tim
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Hum, well, I wasn't actually planning to switch out my MB Air just now.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> I'm actually baffled that I haven't bumped into this before. Both my laptop and my office desktop are Core 2 Duo machines (and the latter is the one that builds the R source releases!).
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> If you use gfortran: which version?
>>>>>> If you are not using any floating point then gfortran-4.8 will probably work without problems.
>>>>>> I think.
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> It's 4.2.1 and 4.2.3, it seems. That's for the local builds; for the CRAN binaries, it seems that I just never tried building a package with Fortran in it. Not sure whether I have used any Fortran binaries (is there an easy way to check whether a package contains Fortran?) 
>>>> 
>>>> But then you are still using the Snow Leopard binaries for R?
>>>> I don’t know if stuff created with the older gfortran  will run with an R built for mavericks.
>>> 
>>> Those were for local builds, which I suppose will by definition be Yosemite/Mavericks builds (laptop/desktop respectively). The corresponding C compiler is gcc, alias
>>> 
>>> $ gcc --version
>>> Configured with: --prefix=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
>>> Apple LLVM version 6.1.0 (clang-602.0.53) (based on LLVM 3.6.0svn)
>>> Target: x86_64-apple-darwin14.4.0
>>> Thread model: posix
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Two of my packages: nleqslv and geigen. They could not compile on my previous C2D computer with gfortran-4.8.
>>>> And another one: QZ.
>>>> And there are some more.
>>>> You would also need the Mavericks binaries of R.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> The CRAN binaries of nleqslv seem to install, load, and run OK with the Mavericks CRAN binaries.
>>> 
>>> Source build of nleqslv builds, loads, runs with a local build on Yosemite.
>>> 
>>> In both cases, "runs" means that example(nleqslv) and example(testnslv) does something seemingly sensible and do not crash.
>>> 
>>> (Source build with Mavericks/CRAN would obviously fail due to the absence of gfortran-4.8 and I wouldn't even try mixing the two Fortran versions.)
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Office: A 4.23
> Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
> 
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