Installing contributed packages on MacOS X: Solved!

I had run into problems when compiling some contributed packages to an
installation of R 1.40 by fink on MacOS X. Namely, packages KernSmooth
(2.22-7) and cluster (1.4-0) would not find required libraries, though those
were present on the system.

Jeff Whitaker, the maintainer of the R fink packages, kindly sent me this:

Kaspar:  It's not looking in /sw/lib, where the libs are (the "-L/sw/lib"
is missing).  Probably a bug in the packages themselves, or in R - I don't
know which.  Seems silly to assume they are installed in /usr/lib or
/usr/local/lib.  However, the r-recommended package has both of these and
installs fine (but they are the older versions).  You could also probably
install them by hand by downloading the source, then use

setenv LDFLAGS -L/sw/lib
setenv CPPFLAGS -I/sw/include
R CMD INSTALL KernSmooth_2.22-7.tar.gz

-Jeff

That solved the problem here instantly.

To the developers: Do I understand correctly that those two packages had
their library path hard-coded instead of "inheriting" it from the R CMD
INSTALL process? I had assumed that R CMD INSTALL would pass on the lib
paths that R itself was compiled with, but I may be wrong... though a
cursory reading of "Writing R Extensions" seems to confirm this.

Anyway, it works now.

Cheers

Kaspar Pflugshaupt

Kaspar Pflugshaupt
Geobotanisches Institut
Zuerichbergstr. 38
CH-8044 Zuerich

Tel. ++41 1 632 43 19
Fax  ++41 1 632 12 15

mailto:pflugshaupt at geobot.umnw.ethz.ch
privat:pflugshaupt at mails.ch
http://www.geobot.umnw.ethz.ch

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