On 15 December 2006 at 16:01, Ivailo Stoyanov wrote: | It seems that the r-base-dev package from the Ubuntu R backport doesn't | provide *all* the packages necessary to build add-on libraries. Re-read and re-think what you wrote there: you expect the r-base-dev package to provide _all_ possible dependencies for _all_ possible packages. The Oracle of Delphi in a few lines of a meta file? That obviously can't work. r-base-dev tries to give you all you need to compile the _most common_ packages by providing essentially what R itself needs. Specialised packages that use other, more arcane libraries and headers such as OpenGL are obviously not included.
Dirk, I'm obviously not that deep into the Debian/Ubuntu package management, and these considerations of mine should be taken just as what they are -- considerations of a puzzled R user that has some problems with building some package;)
Lastly, I can only urge users of Debian and Ubuntu to remember that because we have _native_ packages on Debian and Ubuntu, we also have _native_ Build-Depends information. Had you tried $ sudo apt-get build-dep r-cran-rgl you might have gotten to the finish line much quicker.
Thanks a lot for this hint! It is very useful and I would definitely hit the target much easier if I knew about that. The source for the problem at hand have to be sought back in times when I relied too much on the native cran-r-* packages, until I found that not everything is available natively, so I started to install only the *-base packages and to rely on the *-dev one to provide the dependencies I need to build needed ad-on libraries manually. Actually, until now everything went just fine this way, and I still appreciate much such cases that fill my (still numerous) knowledge gaps.
Regards, Dirk
Greets, Ivailo