R CMD build looking for texi2dvi in the wrong place (R-devel)

----- Original Message -----

From: "Simon Urbanek" <simon.urbanek at r-project.org>
To: "Dan Tenenbaum" <dtenenba at fredhutch.org>
Cc: "R-devel" <r-devel at r-project.org>
Sent: Monday, January 12, 2015 5:50:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Rd] R CMD build looking for texi2dvi in the wrong place (R-devel)

Dan,

On Jan 12, 2015, at 7:50 PM, Dan Tenenbaum <dtenenba at fredhutch.org>
wrote:

R CMD build fails with recent R-devel because it is looking for
texi2dvi in /usr/local/bin, but on this system, MacTex has
installed it in /usr/bin.

No, you're looking at the wrong package - texi2dvi comes from texinfo
which is now mandatory in version 5.2+ located in /usr/local since
OS X comes with an old version. You should install it from

http://r.research.att.com/libs/texinfo-5.2-darwin10.tar.gz

Thanks, was there an announcement that I missed about this and if so, where was it? 

Dan

Cheers,
Simon

$ R CMD build IRanges
* checking for file 'IRanges/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
* preparing 'IRanges':
* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
* cleaning src
* installing the package to build vignettes
* creating vignettes ... ERROR
[...]
Warning in sub(object$syntax$docexpr, val, chunk[pos[1L]]) :
argument 'replacement' has length > 1 and only the first element
will be used
Error in texi2dvi(file = file, pdf = TRUE, clean = clean, quiet =
quiet,  :
Running 'texi2dvi' on 'IRangesOverview.tex' failed.
Messages:
sh: /usr/local/bin/texi2dvi: No such file or directory
Calls: <Anonymous> -> texi2pdf -> texi2dvi
Execution halted

That's with:

R Under development (unstable) (2015-01-11 r67421)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods
 base

The same command works without error on:

R Under development (unstable) (2014-11-11 r66970)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods
 base

Setting
options(texi2dvi='/usr/bin/texi2dvi')

in my ~/.Rprofile did not help, I suspect because R CMD build runs
buildVignettes() in a subprocess started with --vanilla. Creating
a symlink from /usr/bin/texi2dvi to /usr/local/bin/texi2dvi gave
me a "too many levels of symbolic links" error. Making it a hard
link works, but seems like a real hack (what if the executable was
not relocatable?).

Thanks in advance,
Dan