building R 2.4.0 on aix

I've not seen any response to either of these messages, and so am replying in 
an attempt to provide some explanation.  No core R developer has access to 
AIX, nor have we had for some time.  (Most of the recent workarounds for AIX 
have come from the kind efforts of Ei-ji Nakama.)  It does seem AIX rivals 
Darwin (the underlying OS of MacOS X) for being the least alike of the 
Unix-alikes (but fortunately we have Simon Urbanek to explain Darwin to us).

We don't know if R 2.4.0 has been built successfully on AIX: we do know that 
no one reported any problems in the alpha/beta/RC test period.  If no one 
tested it, this indicates a lack of support for the R developers from the AIX 
community.  I believe I have seen a report which indicated that R 2.3.1 was 
built successfully.

Some more specific comments to Eric Harley:

configure:26491: checking how to get verbose linking output from f95
configure:26502: f95 -c  conftest.f >&5
f95: 1501-218 file conftest.f contains an incorrect file suffix

It seems your 'f95' is not a conventional Fortran compiler.  But you have not 
told us what compiler it is: only if we know the full story can we advise 
against it.

but make exits early with errors.

Without telling us what they are, the experts here cannot help.


On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Eric Harley wrote:

Roy and others,

I'm also trying to build R 2.4.0 on aix 5 (5.3 in my case, on an
Intellistation Power 285) and I have not had luck yet.  I notice that
the only mentions of AIX on this list in the past two months are
people not having luck building it.  So far there don't seem to be any
responses, and I don't know if it's from lack of information in the
questions, or because this isn't the right place to ask the questions.

There have been replies, but no responses to those replies.  We often do not 
find out if problems do get resolved.

Does anyone know a good place to ask such questions?  If this is the
right place, please let me know what information you need.

I am unfortunately very new to this business of compiling and linking
on Unix, so I have trouble knowing what information to provide.

Here's my stab at troubleshooting, which is basically trial-and-error:

===
tried just to type ./configure (I can always dream, right?  :-) )
Failed with the following problem in config.log

configure:26491: checking how to get verbose linking output from f95
configure:26502: f95 -c  conftest.f >&5
f95: 1501-218 file conftest.f contains an incorrect file suffix
configure:26508: $? = 1
configure: failed program was:
|       program main
|
|       end
configure:26587: WARNING: compilation failed
configure:26593: result:
config.log (93%)

===
A little playing around shows me that f95 doesn't like to compile
files ending in .f, so I try doing
./configure F77=f77

In this case, the configure script completes successfully.
Now I try
make

but make exits early with errors.
make check
gives

make: 1254-002 Cannot find a rule to create target
../../src/library/base/all.R from dependencies.
Stop.

and a few other 1254-004 errors.

===
There are some examples in
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html , particularly in
the AIX platform notes (C.9 AIX).  However, the second paragraph says
"The rest of this section is historical, as the default *_LDFLAGS were
changed in R 2.4.0." so evidently the examples don't apply to the
current version of R.  I tried some frankenstein combinations of the
options given in the examples, using the xl*_* compilers since I don't
have gfortran on my system, but this kind of thing is time-consuming
when I'm essentially making random changes.

I'm hoping that someone with more experience than I can at least help
me sort through the "Cannot find a rule to create target" error, and
that maybe I can proceed somehow one error at a time and finally end
up with something that works.

BTW, I did try to google the "Cannot find a rule to create target"
"from dependencies", but I don't get much that I can understand.  One
message said something about this means make can't find the source
code.  If this is the problem, how can I figure out what source code
make is looking for, where it's looking for it, and how to tell it the
right place to look?  Or perhaps there's something else I'm missing?

Thanks,
Eric Harley


On 11/20/06, Roy Heimbach <royh at hpc.unm.edu> wrote:

I'm trying to build R 2.4.0 on aix 5 and not having much luck.  If
anyone on the list has built 2.3 or 2.4 on AIX and would be willing
pass along some hints, I would be grateful.  So would the research
group that's waiting to use R.

Thanks,
Roy Heimbach
--
Roy Heimbach <royh at hpc.unm.edu> / 505-277-8348
User Services / Center for High Performance Computing
University of New Mexico