From plummer at iarc.fr  Mon Jan 16 17:50:31 2006
From: plummer at iarc.fr (Martyn Plummer)
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:50:31 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Provide both shlib and standard versions of R?
In-Reply-To: <6ea7b5430601152245w3629a110w586b62f17f35e116@mail.gmail.com>
References: <6ea7b5430601152021y2a54089bj9f8b122b91d007b3@mail.gmail.com>
	<5AC56224-204C-4FFF-881A-994A5C01A11C@r-project.org>
	<6ea7b5430601152203o5d1ff963vdb0323d21c1b4ff2@mail.gmail.com>
	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0601160108290.19320@illuminati.stderr.org>
	<6ea7b5430601152245w3629a110w586b62f17f35e116@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1137430231.2938.48.camel@seurat.iarc.fr>

On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 00:45 -0600, Bo Peng wrote:
> > then either build your own with correct options or talk to your
> > distribution's packaging team.
> 
> It seems that my knowledge about this option is outdated.  When I
> first encountered this problem two years ago, the R/rpm distribution
> came with no libR.so. I was told that --enable-R-shlib would lead to
> 10% - 20% performance loss, and I had to re-compile R if I need to
> embed it.
> 
> So I guess performance is no longer an issue and shared libraries are
> provided as default on all platforms now? I certainly welcome this
> change and I apologize for my unfounded accusation to R.

What changed was that a sufficient number of people asked me to create
an RPM with the shared library and I changed my mind.  The aim of the
precompiled binaries is to satisfy most of the people most of the time,
and when I get repeated requests for the same feature, I have to bear
that in mind. People who require optimal performance can still compile
their own.

As for the idea of compiling two distinct binaries packages for R, I am
not especially keen, and not just out of laziness. The problem is that R
packages depend on libR.so, when it exists, so if you uninstall R with a
shared library and then install R without the shared library you get a
broken system.

You can look at the CAPABILITIES file in the same directory as the RPM
to see how it was compiled.

Martyn

> BTW, shouldn't --enable-R-shlib be yes by default during ./configure?.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bo
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This message and its attachments are strictly confidential. ...{{dropped}}



[Rd] Provide both shlib and standard versions of R?
Martyn Plummer