One idea is to wrap system libraries in R packages. This is what Martin did for zlib with zlibbioc. That's feasible for a tiny library like zlib; for other things this approach would not be feasible. For imlib2 and imagemagick, it might be. Someone has to maintain it, and there would need to be careful consideration of licenses, but there are obvious gains from integrating with the R package framework. Ideally, packages would share the same system library package dependency.
On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Kasper Daniel Hansen < kasperdanielhan...@gmail.com> wrote: > Several packages in Bioconductor (and possibly CRAN) uses > SystemRequirements > in DESCRIPTION, but unless the user reads the DESCRIPTION file, this is for > naught. Still useful to some people I think. > > Best, > Kasper > > > On Sun, Jul 13, 2014 at 9:13 PM, Greg Minshall <minsh...@acm.org> wrote: > > > hi. i'm working on a package which only works if one (or both) of two > > libraries (Imlib2 and MagickWand) exist on the machine on which the > > package is compiled and executed. as currently written, the program > > purposely generates an error at *compile* time if neither library is > > available (thinking the earlier the user is notified, the less > > frustrating). > > > > is there a way of specifying this dependency in, say, the DESCRIPTION > > file? (seems unlikely, as this is what the whole autotools/configure.ac > > framework is supposed to deal with.) > > > > or, should i take out the compile time error (maybe replace my #error > > with a #warning), and just generate at error at run time? (this will > > require me to figure out what that means for build tests/, but obviously > > some sort of hack is doable.) > > > > cheers, Greg > > > > ______________________________________________ > > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
