Sooner or later we are going to have to require iconv for fully functional
R installations.
The only systems we are aware of that do not come with a suitable iconv
(with support for Unicode charsets like UTF-8) are some older commercial
Unixen, and GNU libiconv works on those we know of.
Does anyone have a system for which R's configure does not find a working
iconv and on which they could not install GNU libiconv? I am
contemplating that 2.5.0 would need to be explicitly configured with
--without-iconv to allow it to be built on such a system, and that 'make
check' would not then work. (An alternative would be to bundle libiconv
with R, but it is 4Mb and would be needed very rarely. For Windows users
we provide a DLL, which is compiled with VC++ as that is what works out
of the box.)
(capabilities("iconv") will tell you the status of a build if you have
forgotten what happened at configure time.)
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at 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