Two comments: 1) Marc did not suggest updating to FC4 but to Fedora. It makes a lot of sense to update RH8.0/9 systems to FC3 (which is what we have done) or RHEL4 or CentOS (which have a similar code base).
2) A fully patched FC4 is indeed usable as Marc says, and some R-core members use it. R works well with gcc4.0.2/gfortran apart from a few issues reported in the R-admin manual. Almost all the problems with CRAN packages are related to gfortran: some are not legal Fortran 77, and others gfortran cannot compile or can only compile without optimization. One thing that is dangerous on some architectures (notably x86_64 and ia64, also known from PPC) is to mix code compiled with gcc4 and gcc3 since the argument-passing conventions were changed. So I would start an FC4 installation afresh rather than do an upgrade even from FC3. On Fri, 30 Dec 2005, Marc Schwartz wrote: > On Sat, 2005-12-31 at 12:30 +1100, paul sorenson wrote: >> Marc Schwartz wrote: >>> ... >>> On a side note, RH9 is a fairly dated and EOL'd distribution, with >>> security updates and bug patches only provided by the Fedora Legacy >>> folks (http://fedoralegacy.org). You should consider upgrading to Fedora >>> in the near future (if you want to stay with RH), since the FL folks can >>> drop support for RH9 at any time, leaving you vulnerable. >> >> Yes but also don't do this naively. You might find that gcc 4 breaks >> some of your source compilations and IIRC this is the default compiler >> if you install FC4 with the "install everything" option. I haven't >> tried compiling R with gcc 4, this is just a general comment. > > I do know that Prof. Ripley, Peter Dalgaard and Martyn Plummer have > spent a fair amount of time on this issue and there are notes in the > R-admin manual regarding some of the gcc 4.x problems. > > There were also various discussions on r-devel and offlist over the past > several months about these issues, later including Tom Callaway from Red > Hat, who is the Fedora Extras package maintainer for the R offerings in > those repos. These had to do with the various compiler, optimization > flag and later BLAS/LAPACK issues. > > The current gcc version on a fully updated FC4 system is: > > $ gcc --version > gcc (GCC) 4.0.2 20051125 (Red Hat 4.0.2-8) > > and I believe solves the prior issues related to 4.0.0. R compiles fine > on my fully updated FC4 system and passes 'make check all' without > error. -- 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 ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
