gfortran: command not found
On 08/07/2023 00:41, Spencer Graves wrote:
Hello, Simon Urbanek and Professor Ripley: On 7/7/23 4:21 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
On Jul 7, 2023, at 6:54 PM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote: An alternative is not to have gfortran on the path and use a personal Makevars file, as documented at https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-devel/R-admin.html#macOS-packages . Reasons to do it that way include a) GCC builds have included other compilers including gcc in the same directory as gfortran, and I have been caught in the past by badly-written software looking for gcc as a C compiler and finding that one rather than Apple's gcc which is a wrapper for clang.? (The current gfortran distribution only includes x86_64-apple-darwin20.0-gcc and similar.) b) If the gfortran you have installed differs from that used to build R, you may need to set FLIBS, and this has happened as different CRAN distributions have been built with different versions of gfortran. When I do want gfortran on the path, for example to build other software, I do symlink it to somewhere on my path. I would prefer if Simon continues to give the full path as FC in etc/Makeconf: anyone who wants a different compiler can use a personal Makevars.? (Continues at least for arm64, and I would prefer consistency.)
I agree - it wasn't entirely intentional (it's really historical), but then there was request for a PATH-less gfortran settings. After this discussion I agree that it's not a good idea since the instructions on CRAN should be fully self-sufficient *and* we want to avoid other incompatible Fortran compilers. (I have trouble reaching the x86_64 build machine from home right now, so I'll change it on Monday).
????? Might it be feasible and appropriate for me to try to do this on my 2014 MacBook Pro running macOS 11.7.8? ????? I ask, because I have so far not been able to parse the instructions in the link Prof. Ripley provided above.? I found a ".r" subdirectory in my default directory, but its contents seems to be only "crashpad_database".? I did not see anything that looked to me like, "HOME/.R/Makevars-R_PLATFORM".? ???
You need to create the file (which is called ~/.R/Makevars in the section I referred you to). Using a case-insenstive file system does not help (I had no idea what created ~/.r/crashpad_database, but Googling suggests RStudio). (If you did not have ~/.r, you would need mkdir ~/.R in a Terminal.) Then use your favourite editor to create a file ~/.r/Makevars containing the single line FC=/opt/gfortran/bin/gfortran The only issue is if you ever install a new gfortran you will need to edit/remove this file -- it is easily forgotten. As Simon says he is changing this soon, I would make a note to remove the file when you update R.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford