Prof J C Nash (U30A) writes:
I've been implementing a wrapper to the 2011 Fortran version of
L-BFGS-B. In optim(), R uses a C translation of a Fortran version (the
version number does not appear to be documented by the original
authors). The authors of the original Fortran code have updated it and
published the reasons in ACM TOMS due to inefficiencies and a bug.
In running the checks on the resulting package (which is on R-forge
under the optimizer project), I'm getting a number of warning messages
of the type
Warning in file.copy(file.path(.Library, pkg, "DESCRIPTION"), pd) :
problem copying /usr/lib/R/library/mgcv/DESCRIPTION to
/tmp/Rtmp0kkeHo/RLIBS_1214765d1c5f/mgcv/DESCRIPTION: No such file or
directory
which reference DESCRIPTIONs for a number of packages other than the one
being checked -- here mgcv -- and which are not referenced in my package
as far as I can determine.
Possibly unrelated, when I run the code on a problem, it works for one
run, then gives a NAMESPACE error and failure on the second try. Apart
from this, checks and unit tests appear to work correctly.
Does anyone have pointers where I might find some ideas on the origin of
the issue(s)? I suspect the warning messages are not particularly
indicative of the source of the warnings, but that I have some subtle
glitch in the setup and call to the Fortran.
I suspect this is not platform dependent, but I'm running Linux Mint
17.1 (ubuntu derivative), and R 3.1.2.