From edd at debian.org  Tue Oct 24 03:50:55 2006
From: edd at debian.org (Dirk Eddelbuettel)
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:50:55 -0500
Subject: [Rd] ANN/RFC: package providing TAB completion for
	readline-based R
In-Reply-To: <eb555e660610231651q7a2c399ch3dff71bad6abf246@mail.gmail.com>
References: <eb555e660610231651q7a2c399ch3dff71bad6abf246@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <17725.29055.367514.571245@basebud.nulle.part>


On 23 October 2006 at 16:51, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
[... nice announcement trimmed ...]
| There are a couple of things about which I would like some advice:
| 
| (1) The package currently contains a very rudimentary configure script
| which stops installation when readline is not found. I'm not sure if
| this is portable enough. .../src/unix/sys-std.c has more sophisticated
| conditional directives, but I don't know enough about this sort of
| thing to interpret those. Any thoughts or suggestions on this would be
| appreciated.

littler has the same issue for getopt, R itself, R as a dynamic library,
....  So far, we are going with 'just bark and stop'.

For rcompletion, I hope you simply stick with configure.  I don't like the
trend of shipping everything again and again (Hi, Seth :)

| (2) What's the recommended procedure to distribute this, given that
| (a) it's not relevant on Windows (i.e. won't do anything even if it
| could be installed) and (b) may or may not be relevant on Macs, some
| of which apparently have a fake readline that doesn't support
| completion?

Again, I also wondered if littler should just pretend to be a CRAN package so
that at least the update and compile mechanism works from R (given how we
need re-runs of configure and make if something changes as we depend on
compile-time 'hard' settings for littler as opposed to env. vars for R).

The problem we are facing is that we're unsure how to get to
/usr/(local/)/bin from update.packages() ...

Given that you'll undoubtedly come up with something clever, Jeff and I will
be sure to see if we can mimic it :)

Dirk

-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison




[Rd] ANN/RFC: package providing TAB completion for readline-based R
Dirk Eddelbuettel