On Tue, 24 Oct 2006, Uwe Ligges wrote: > > > Deepayan Sarkar wrote: >> Announcement: >> >> (For those every-once-in-a-while occasions when you run R from a >> terminal instead of Emacs, and then wish something would happen when >> you hit TAB...) >> >> Last week, I started looking at the GNU Readline documentation to see >> if I could figure out how to use it for command completion within R. >> It turned out to be easier than I had expected, and I now have a beta >> version of the 'rcompletion' package available at >> >> http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/R/rcompletion_0.0-6.tar.gz >> >>> From the help page: >> >> Description: >> >> This package provides pseudo-intelligent TAB completion for a >> readline enabled instance of R when it is run from a terminal (or >> more specifically, an interface which uses readline to accept user >> input). It has no effect on the various GUI interfaces to R, >> including ESS and the standard Windows interface. >> >> For more details, install and load the package, then type >> >> package?rcompletion >> >> at the R prompt. Testing and feedback would be appreciated. Feature >> requests and patches are also welcome, of course. >> >> >> Questions: >> >> There are a couple of things about which I would like some advice: >> >> (1) The package currently contains a very rudimentary configure script >> which stops installation when readline is not found. I'm not sure if >> this is portable enough. .../src/unix/sys-std.c has more sophisticated >> conditional directives, but I don't know enough about this sort of >> thing to interpret those. Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be >> appreciated.
I don't think that is safe. You can have R installed with readline support even if there are neither readline headers nor library on the current machine (use a static library), and R can be run without readline (via --no-readline) even if it is installed. However, your configure script fails on my machine (x86_64 FC5). It seems that you need both to get LDFLAGS and LD_LIBRARY_PATH from R and use them, and also use a version of autoconf that knows about lib64 (since the readline DSO is in /usr/lib64). Since I don't get any further I am not sure what really happens, but it seems you don't link your DLL against -lreadline, and I think you need to to allow for static libreadline.a (the relevant code seems to be a separate .o and so is likely not linked into R in that case). I guess that you want to know that R was installed with readline support at install time, and is running with the readline console? It is not immediately obvious to me that either is currently known to a package writer/user. >> (2) What's the recommended procedure to distribute this, given that >> (a) it's not relevant on Windows (i.e. won't do anything even if it >> could be installed) and (b) may or may not be relevant on Macs, some >> of which apparently have a fake readline that doesn't support >> completion? > > > Distribution can happen regularly as a CRAN package. I will put it on my > exclude list in order not to try building Windows binaries in that case. I think there should also be a configure.win which explains that the package is not usable on Windows, in case someone tries to install from the sources. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
