On Sat, 29 Nov 2003, Simon Urbanek wrote:
BTW: This is not Mac specific - I was fighting this on Windows (and
unix for that matter) as well - it is possible to run an .exe linked to
R.dll from anywhere, if R.dll is in the PATH. But then, one has to
determine R_HOME somehow (yes, there is the registry, but that's not
really safe if more R versions are installed).
How do you do that? For R's own executables on Windows R_HOME is
determined from where they are loaded from. You cannot AFAIK determine
from within an executable where the R.dll was linked from. That's why the
rproxy.dll uses the registry. I believe you have even less information on
Windows.
On Mac OS X there is a very nice CoreFoundation function: CFBundleGetBundleWithIdentifier. Each bundle can have an unique identifier and the above function will return the bundle reference if the bundle was loaded by the current application - and a framework is a bundle. So for Mac OS X this piece of code will determine R_HOME of the linked R.framework:
CFBundleRef bundle = CFBundleGetBundleWithIdentifier(CFSTR("org.r-project.r-framework") );
CFURLRef rdir=CFBundleCopyBundleURL(bundle);
CFStringRef rhome=CFURLCopyFileSystemPath(rdir,kCFURLPOSIXPathStyle);
I doubt there is any standard way on unix platforms in general. I have a vague feeling that I saw some relevant API on Windows - at least form the DLL itself, but I'm stuck with my PowerBook for three more week until I get home, so I can't check that easily.
I would suggest a fallback for cases where the location cannot be determined: we could use a tiny source file like location.c.in (could be config.h.in itself for that matter) which gets processed by configure and contains the install path. Then any program linked to R shlib could call a function like char* R_installPath(); Although that is not optimal, it is in general unlikely that the user would move R after doing make install (unless it's a network installation of course - then we're in trouble) and it is even safer that the registry on Windows. It would be an useful fallback for platforms where we simply don't know.
Simon
PS: My script mentioned in the original post doesn't create proper Info,plist if ran by /bin/sh - you can get the correct Info.plist for R 1.8.1 from http://stats.math.uni-augsburg.de/misc/Info.plist and copy it to .../R.framework/Resources/
--- Simon Urbanek Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis Universitätsstr. 14 86135 Augsburg Germany
Tel: +49-821-598-2236 Fax: +49-821-598-2280
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://simon.urbanek.info
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