First testing of R-2.0.0 alpha on Gentoo Linux

"M. Edward Borasky" <znmeb@aracnet.com> writes:

I just got R-2.0.0 alpha running on my Gentoo Linux system. The only
issue I had was that if I do "--with-lapack" in the "configure", "make
check" fails very early. 

It would have been helpful to say where, exactly.

Once I removed that option, "make check-all"

passed. I have both "blas-atlas" and "lapack-atlas" installed on my
system. The Atlas version is 3.6.0.

Hmm, but would the linker know where to find them? Also, there could
be an issue with dynamic vs. static libraries. Any configure experts
around? 

(Well, I wrote that part of configure, amongst others.) R-admin does warn
against using --with-lapack:

  Provision is made for using an external LAPACK library, principally to
  cope with BLAS libraries which contain a copy of LAPACK ...

Note that lapack-atlas is probably not a complete lapack, and if it is, it 
may not be bug-fixed ...

   If you do use @option{--with-lapack}, be aware of potential problems
   with bugs in the LAPACK 3.0 sources (or in the posted corrections to 
   those sources).

So all I can conclude from this is that Gentoo's libraries are not 
sufficient.

When I do this, I have to be very careful how I build LAPACK, using
-fforce-store where R does.  It then works but I see negligible 
performance boost (Goto's BLAS is better than ATLAS, anyway).

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
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