Building R under Linux - library dependencies
On Wed, Sep 7, 2016 at 1:50 PM, Pawe? Pi?tkowski <cosi1 at tlen.pl> wrote:
| Is there a way to overcome this problem? Precompiled versions of R can
be installed on various system configurations, so I guess that there should be a way to compile it in a version-agnostic manner.
Yes, for example by -- using a Docker container which is portable across OSs (!!) and
versions Docker R containers are north of 250 MB. I have checked experimentally that you can trim R down to 16 MB (!) and you'll still be able to execute it (though with warnings). That *is* quite a difference, especially when deploying small applications.
... I would guesstimate the libraries required to run R with any useful set of libraries is quite a bit bigger than the cited 16M .......
-- relying on package management which is what every Linux distro does (...) PS For the latter point, our .deb based R package currently shows this: (...) Depends: zip, unzip, libpaper-utils, xdg-utils, libblas3 | libblas.so.3,
libbz2-1.0, libc6 (>= 2.23), libcairo2 (>= 1.6.0), libcurl3 (>= 7.28.0), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0), libgomp1 (>= 4.9), libjpeg8 (>= 8c), liblapack3 | liblapack.so.3, liblzma5 (>= 5.1.1alpha+20120614), libpango-1.0-0 (>= 1.14.0), libpangocairo-1.0-0 (>= 1.14.0), libpcre3, libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4), libreadline6 (>= 6.0), libtcl8.6 (>= 8.6.0), libtiff5 (>= 4.0.3), libtk8.6 (>= 8.6.0), libx11-6, libxt6, zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), ucf (>= 3.0), ca-certificates Sure, package dependencies would be great as well - at least you'd be sure that users of, say, Debian-based distros will be able to run this portable R, as long as they've installed the required libraries. But notice that in your example package versions equal *or greater* than listed are required - so if someone has upgraded their system, they still will be able to run that R. With a version built from source you need *exactly* the same version as on the machine where R was compiled. Hence my question: how come the precompiled distribution of R has "less strict" library requirements than manually compiled versions?
Package managers don't usually cite 'less than' versions for packages - because how do you assert a version that won't work when it hasn't been released yet? You could go on a tear and build statically linked versions of R-with-everything-you-need, and maybe avoid the library madness... but this is sort of a fool's errand and a huge consumer of time. OS vendors and compiler developers have stopped doing things that way for reasons.... it's much simpler to reduce duplication and make everything work - while allowing for patching out security issues - when you are *just slightly* more flexible. ABI compatibility and library versioning are, I think, fairly well understood.... Doing this stuff with a container is very much the easiest route, if you actually want it to be completely portable. You're certainly welcome to start with an Alpine Linux base and add R on top and then start paring... but I start to not understand the point, somewhere in there.... it's a lot of time spent on something that doesn't seem that beneficial when you've got (even fairly reasonably modern) hardware that can deal with a tiny bit of extra bloat. SD cards and USB sticks are pretty cheap everywhere, now, aren't they? I could say, maybe, putting time into this as some kind of retrocomputing project... but probably not otherwise. best, --e