Summary on Usage of R CMD INSTALL

"David Kane writes:

Thanks to Tim Hoar and Kurt Hornik for taking the time to answer my question
about the usage of R CMD INSTALL. Tim suggested:

R CMD INSTALL --configure-args=--with-netCDF=/opt/local/netcdf-3.5.0 netCDF

no quotes at all, no spaces ...

Kurt wrote:

R CMD INSTALL --configure-vars='LIBS=-L/mylibs' mypackage

Alas, I am not smart enough to know whether there is a contradiction
between these two suggestions. My goal was to install the RODBC
library in a situation in which we have libraries and other things in
non-standard places.

In the end, a system-savy friend succeeded in this. He reports:

The problem was that the the shell script wrapping called by 
R CMD INSTALL called "SHLIB" was not allowing environment variables
set in the executing shell to be used in the "${MAKE}" call. The fix 
was to temporarily change the call in SHLIB to "${MAKE} -e" to force it 
use the external environment variables. RODBC is a package that needs
several external variables to be set and the --configure-vars or
--configure-args options seem to be ineffective in trying to set
this library up.

Perhaps there is an easier way to get it done via some combination of 
--configure-args and/or --configure-vars that someone has found to 
work with RODBC. I have tried many different combinations but cannot
say that I've tried all combinations.

Anyway, the above remedy works and it installs RODBC into R.

Again, I don't know if this work-around is an indication of problems
with 1) my understanding of R CMD INSTALL and/or RODBC and/or UNIX; 2)
R CMD INSTALL or 3) RODBC. I certainly agree with Kurt's suggestions
that there should be more documentation/pointers on these issues. I
offer the above in the hope that someone benefits from it.