Multiple sub-architecture: linking issue

This is a follow up of the r-devel post:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-June/064271.html

On 11 June 2012 at 09:33, Renaud Gaujoux wrote:
| On 11/06/2012 03:43, Simon Urbanek wrote:
|     As far as R is concerned it works equally well on Linux - the problem there is more on the side of distributions, because it is more unusual to have multi-lib Linux (originally it was used on Linux only to get 3rd party [mostly proprietary] 32-bit binaries working on 64-bit systems and that is now less of an issue). As I said in the original post it works reasonably well on Debian (not for all libraries since only a subset is available, but all the basic ones) -- there were shakeups in Ubuntu which were messing with the multilib support, so I don't know the current status but I can check at work tomorrow (probably not for something as ancient as natty, though).

I upgraded Ubuntu to 12.04 and installation of most packages work, so 
the issue must have been due to missing system packages as Simon suggested.
I still have an issue with RCurl though. It appeared when wanting to 
install 'devtools' but seems to be more general:

```
* installing *source* package ?devtools? ...
** package ?devtools? successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** R
** inst
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** testing if installed package can be loaded
*** arch - amd64
*** arch - i386
Error in library.dynam(lib, package, package.lib) :
shared object ?RCurl.so? not found
Error: loading failed
Execution halted
ERROR: loading failed for ?i386?
* removing ?/home/renaud/bin/R/2.15/lib/R/library/devtools?
* restoring previous ?/home/renaud/bin/R/2.15/lib/R/library/devtools?

The downloaded source packages are in
?/tmp/RtmphErtgP/downloaded_packages?
Updating HTML index of packages in '.Library'
Making packages.html ... done
Warning message:
In install.packages("devtools", repos = "http://cran.r-project.org") :
installation of package ?devtools? had non-zero exit status
```

I noticed that when installing RCurl, it seems to only compile for the 
current session's architecture, while other packages build on both 
architectures, whether called from a 32 or 64 bits session.
So RCurl is then typically only available on one architecture, and any 
install depending on it would fail.
Is anybody able to reproduce this?

I usually disagree with statements like this. Debian does this pretty reliably, and
I also update all my Ubuntu machines within a few weeks of the releases. And
Ubuntu 12.04 has been a rather smooth upgrade on all of them. But if you're
several releases behind, maybe you did more 'funky' stuff you now need to
consider.

Ok, I should have been stayed away from such a general statement :)
While the upgrade or fresh install+restore packages takes a couple of 
hours, I often spend the rest of the day to get the environment 
identical to what I had before upgrading. Nothing too funky: re-figure 
out things like how I to get through an annoying proxy, and deal with 
surprises in new versions of some apps, etc..
For sure my upgrade workflow is far from optimal. Upgrades are 
eventually just a -- frustrating -- day :)

Renaud