problems compiling R packages with Linux

Ulf Mehlig writes:

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote

On our Red-Hat 5.2 systems, with egcs-g77 installed, I have to set

SHLIBLDFLAGS=-shared

in config.site. It looks to me as is that is your problem too. This
is not inconsistency, just a failure to guess right. I never trust
configure scripts, so do check over these things (they are in the
file Makeconf) and override in config.site any I don't agree with.

Thank you very much! Now it works! 

I won't trust 'configure' any more ;-)   Couldn't you put this hint as
a footnote in file "INSTALL" or "PLATFORMS"? BTW, my distribution is
"DLD (Deutsche Linux Distribution)" v. 5.4, if you want to put that
in that list ...

Brian:  It is not very kind of you to motivate others into distrusting
my configure scripts :-)

It is also not the right approach.  Even if my time is seriously
constrained I'd prefer that configure-related problems are communicated
and fixed (by me) in the configure scripts.  Otherwise (as in our case),
eventually people ask that fixes be mentioned in the INSTALL file and/or
in the FAQ, which is not right ... (the fix can easily be coded into the
configure script, which will keep installation instructions as simple as
possible).

Currently, SHLIBLDFLAGS is determined via the XWindows configuration,
and overridden on some platforms where necessary.  The approach is not
optimal, but should work in case the standard linker is used.  In
particular, it should work on Linux/XFree86 systems.

Ulf, Brian:  Can you please try running

  grep 'SHLIBLDFLAGS' Makefile | sed 's/ *SHLIBLDFLAGS *= *//'

on your system and see what it gives?

Thanks
-k
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