FS#4910 - r pkg built with --enable-R-shlib would make libR.so

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by David Scholl (djscholl) - Thursday, 29 June 2006, 11:35 GMT
Last edited by Jan de Groot (JGC) - Friday, 07 July 2006, 10:37 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Damir Perisa (damir.perisa)
Architecture not specified
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 0.7.2 Gimmick
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

The r package is built without the --enable-R-shlib configure option. If this option were added to the build, the shared library libR.so would be produced and included in the package. libR.so is required for the AUR package python-rpy, as well as open source projects RSPython and rkward. These three projects fail to build with the error message

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lR

when the stock version of r is installed via pacman from the repositories. As a work-around, users of these three projects need to obtain the PKGBUILD (and related files) from CVS, add the --enable-R-shlib configure option, and build their own r package.

See forum threads:
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=13278&highlight=libr
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=12008&highlight=libr

The R website warns of a speed penalty of 15-20% on i686 Linux using the shlib option. (See Appendix B1 and footnotes in http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html). However, the R packages distributed with FreeBSD and Fedora Linux, as well as the SuSE binaries on the R website, are built with shlib. It seems to me that either choice is valid for the default Arch build. The maintainer may not wish to incur the speed penalty. I am filing this request simply to let the maintainer know that the users of the python-rpy package (a fairly new package, and already 3 votes), and possibly others, would benefit if the default were changed.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Damir Perisa (damir.perisa)
Friday, 07 July 2006, 20:11 GMT
Reason for closing:  Implemented
Additional comments about closing:  pkgdb2-add: updating r (2.3.1-1 ==> 2.3.1-2)
Comment by Damir Perisa (damir.perisa) - Friday, 07 July 2006, 19:47 GMT
--enable-R-shlib will be added to the official r pkg.... some time ago i was doing some really strange things with R and that is why i didn't leave the option for enabling shlibs. nobody complained and it stayed like this. now i don't see any reason to not use shlibs. it is true that R is slower when compiled like this, but if somebody wants full speed, he/she has anyway to rebuild it for his specific ARCH... this would give in some cases much more than just 20% better performance. ... and hey: maybe this tools you are speaking about are comming also quite usefull... i have to admit, that i don't know them and always used R in normal console for my things.

by the way: if you know an intelligent way to pack R packages (CRAN pkgs) to arch packages, i'm interested to maintain the most popular ones. i have set up now some in my local repository (instead of directly installing them from R... because then pacman does not know who these files belong to - you cannot do pacman -Qo /whatever/file and get a pkg - one of the most useful tools in arch). feel free to email me and tell it also to the forums (i'm not visiting the forums)

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