How to workaround RStudio issues
An update: The RStudio bug that causes problems here is triggered by setting "Automatically activate project-local Python environments" in the Python global option. Unsetting that checkbox stops /usr/local/bin from being prepended. I've decided not to try to work around this in rgl's configure script. Duncan Murdoch
On 2024-06-15 2:13 p.m., Duncan Murdoch wrote:
RStudio is causing problems for rgl builds. In particular, on my M3 system, I have installed the arm64 binaries and tools in /opt/R/arm64/bin as recommended, and builds work fine if I run them in a shell with that directory first in the PATH. However, when I try to do builds in RStudio, they fail. I think this is because it prepends /usr/local/bin to my PATH before configuring, and the rgl configure script finds the x86_64 versions of some files before the arm64 ones, and they don't work. So then rgl thinks I don't have X11 libs available, and builds as though I don't. This isn't the right place to ask how to fix RStudio. I've already done that in one of their forums, and I already know how to build rgl outside of it. However, I do get complaints from users who try to build rgl and have the builds fail (e.g. https://github.com/dmurdoch/rgl/issues/423), and I'd like to make the configure script resilient against this sort of problem. (And this might not be RStudio specific: there are lots of ways to end up with a PATH that doesn't have things in the right order.) So here are my questions: - What is the correct way in a package configure script (or configure.ac, since I use autoconf) to determine that the build is happening on an arm64 Mac? - Is it correct in a configure script to force the arm64 directory to be first? If so, how do I do that? - How do I determine if the user really did install the arm64 files to /opt/R/arm64/bin? - Should I really be doing this, or is my system broken since my /usr/local/bin directory contains things it shouldn't, or should I just tell people to put /opt/R/arm64/bin first in their PATH? Duncan Murdoch