Hi, I noticed recently when installing the GDD package for R under GNU/Linux that it required the gd library (http://libgd.org/) for generating graphics.
The resolution of this was to simply install the library on my system, and then GDD successfully installed without any complaints. However, the variant of GNU/Linux that I use is Gentoo, so I filed a bug requesting that a USE flag be set for the R ebuild so that users could automatically pull in the library when installing R simply by setting a flag for the package (Gentoo's package management system Portage allows specific packages to have USE flags for setting a packages ./configure flags and pulling in package dependencies and so forth, this isn't particularly relevant to the question, but more info can be found at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=3). A recent revision of the ebuild for R removed this flag as there was no direct requirement of the gd library by R. Anyway, after a few short discussions with one of the Gentoo maintainers for R I was asked various questions about how this should be dealt with, and being unable to answer everything I am asking the wider R community for assistance and advice. The main aim is to improve the way in which Gentoo handles the various packages that are available for R, and improve on the way in which dependencies such as the above are handle when compiling R. Q.1 How many packages on CRAN have package specific dependencies? Only using a subset of the R packages I'm only aware of the GDD dependency on libgd. Are there others out there? Q.2. Is R capable of tracking dependencies of packages on CRAN? To my knowledge it isn't, as (to the best of memory, it was about six months ago now) I simply received a non-zero exit when trying to install GDD when I didn't have libgd installed. R had no way of saying "Hang on this package needs this library, lets install it" and I wouldn't expect R to as it would make it particularly problematic if a user has installed locally or doesn't have the correct permissions etc. But would it be appropriate for R to have a configure option to check for a dependency required by various packages? I do realise that this is putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps 'stricter' management of package inclusion would help so that all dependencies of a submitted package are passed onto R developers and appropriate configure flags can be added (although again this still leaves the horse behind the cart). Q.3. Does anyone have experience of dealing with this on other distributions? How does Debian/Slackware/Fedora etc. deal with problems like this? Particularly given that these are often pre-compiled (under Gentoo everything is compiled from source), does this mean that package maintainers of R for these various distros are aware of the dependencies of all packages and include the relevant libraries when compiling? The Gentoo R maintainer is going to look at alternatives for managing CRAN packages (one possible option is http://paludis.pioto.org/ which has some CRAN support already). Something similar has been done for Perl/CPAN (see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/perl/g-cpan.xml) and this may be an option for CRAN. Any and all comments and thoughts are more than welcome. Regards Neil -- "Don't remember what you can infer." - Harry Tennant Email - [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website - http://slack.ser.man.ac.uk/ Photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/slackline/ -- "Don't remember what you can infer." - Harry Tennant Email - [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website - http://slack.ser.man.ac.uk/ Photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/slackline/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
