Installing packages from source for all installed sub-architectures

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>  wrote:

On 06/03/2012 01:24, Simon Urbanek wrote:

Dan,

On Mar 5, 2012, at 7:09 PM, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:

Hello,

Are there plans to modify install.packages() on Mac so that if
type="source", the package is installed for all installed
sub-architectures?

This works for Windows.

Currently,
install.packages("mypkg", type="source")
**may** do the right thing, depending on what type of native code the
package has, whether if has a configure script., etc, but there's no
guarantee.

The same is true for Windows - to my best knowledge the rules are
the

same on all platforms -- Makefile or configure prevent a package from
being built for more than one architecture, because they may modify the
sources in-place and thus the package can only be built once. The only
difference I'm aware of is that some Windows packages use configure.win
for things other than configuration, so binary maintainers may choose to
ignore those but that is not the default AFAIK.

That's my understanding too -- a small list of such packages is already
known to INSTALL.

Cheers,
Simon

I might add that even installing a binary is not guaranteed to give
you .so files for all sub-architectures. CRAN and Bioconductor create
multi-arch binaries, but other package distributors may not do this,
in fact, they likely won't, since the procedure for generating such
binaries is not part of R and is therefore not documented as such.

Eh?  The recommended approach, INSTALL --merge-multiarch, _is_ part of R.
  Although I rarely use it on Macs, AFAIK it works equally well there as on
Windows.  And install.packages() takes arguments to be passed to INSTALL via
INSTALL_opts .

I never knew that --merge-multiarch was available for Macs. I tested
it and it seems to work.
I assumed that it was not available for Macs because it appears in the
"Windows only" section of R CMD INSTALL --help on my R (R version
2.15.0 alpha (2012-03-02 r58567).

Perhaps --merge-multiarch can be moved out of the "Windows" only
section of R CMD INSTALL --help?

Thanks,
Dan

There are of course ways to work around this. But it would be nice not
to have to work around it, and it would be very nice if a single
command could install a package (and, importantly, all its
dependencies) from source for all available architectures.

We are not so far off that, but can only workaround _some_ of the strange
things package maintainers do.  For example, all but 0.5% of CRAN packages
which install at all install 'out of the box' on Windows: the exceptions
need --multi-arch.  On a Mac the figure appears to be 1-2%.

My experience is that there is a _tiny_ small proportion of R users
installing from source on systems with multiple architectures who care about
more than one architecture.  (It is a long while since I used 32-bit R on
Windows, Mac or Linux except as an R developer to test things.) And I think
most of those people are knowledgeable enough to write their own scripts to
cover the exceptions.

--
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595