Hi Simon, Dan,
On 03/05/2012 05:24 PM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
Dan,
On Mar 5, 2012, at 7:09 PM, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:
Hello,
Are there plans to modify install.packages() on Mac so that if
type="source", the package is installed for all installed
sub-architectures?
This works for Windows.
Currently,
install.packages("mypkg", type="source")
**may** do the right thing, depending on what type of native code the
package has, whether if has a configure script., etc, but there's no
guarantee.
The same is true for Windows - to my best knowledge the rules are the same on
all platforms -- Makefile or configure prevent a package from being built for
more than one architecture, because they may modify the sources in-place and
thus the package can only be built once. The only difference I'm aware of is
that some Windows packages use configure.win for things other than
configuration, so binary maintainers may choose to ignore those but that is not
the default AFAIK.
But OTOH, section 5.4 of the "R for Mac OS X FAQ" says:
Once all tools are in place it is considerably easy to build an
universal binary. If the package does not contain a configure script
then a regular package installation using either install.packages or
R CMD INSTALL automatically creates an universal binary. If the
package contains a configure script then it cannot be compiled
in-place for multiple platforms, and the following process should be
used. Assuming that you have a source package called foo_1.0.tar.gz
that uses a configure script, it can be installed universally using
the following three-step process:
# full 32-bitIntel install
R --arch=i386 CMD INSTALL foo_1.0.tar.gz
# 64-bit Intel library
R --arch=x86_64 CMD INSTALL --libs-only foo_1.0.tar.gz
# 32-bit PowerPC library (will require Rosetta to build)
R --arch=ppc CMD INSTALL --libs-only foo_1.0.tar.gz
So the question is: why can't R CMD INSTALL just do this? I can deal
with the 3 above steps for a single package (assuming I have access
to the shell). But in general I like to be able to install packages
from R because typically the package I install requires a lot of
dependencies and install.packages() will solve the dependency problem
for me. Unfortunately, using the above trick in that context is a
pain.
Couldn't R CMD INSTALL --merge-multiarch be supported on Mac and do
something like the 3 steps above? That would be a first step towards
a little bit more convenience as I would be able to do
install.packages("foo", INSTALL_opts="--merge-multiarch")
Thanks,
H.
Cheers,
Simon
I might add that even installing a binary is not guaranteed to give
you .so files for all sub-architectures. CRAN and Bioconductor create
multi-arch binaries, but other package distributors may not do this,
in fact, they likely won't, since the procedure for generating such
binaries is not part of R and is therefore not documented as such.
There are of course ways to work around this. But it would be nice not
to have to work around it, and it would be very nice if a single
command could install a package (and, importantly, all its
dependencies) from source for all available architectures.
Thanks!
Dan
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--
Hervé Pagès
Program in Computational Biology
Division of Public Health Sciences
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N, M1-B514
P.O. Box 19024
Seattle, WA 98109-1024
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: (206) 667-5791
Fax: (206) 667-1319
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