From Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at  Tue Apr  3 16:46:23 2001
From: Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at (Friedrich Leisch)
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 17:46:23 +0200
Subject: [Rd] lstat and NFS server not responding
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0104030657280.22896-100000@auk.stats>
References: <3AC916F5.373D48A7@bank-banque-canada.ca>
 <Pine.GSO.4.31.0104030657280.22896-100000@auk.stats>
Message-ID: <15049.61519.782716.944265@galadriel.ci.tuwien.ac.at>

>>>>> On Tue, 3 Apr 2001 07:06:47 +0100 (BST),
>>>>> Prof Brian D Ripley (PBDR) wrote:

  > On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Paul Gilbert wrote:
  >> In a somewhat unusual circumstance I have been having trouble when
  >> making R from source and with "R CMD build dse"
  >> forcing the machine to look for an NFS server which was not available,
  >> and then stalling. Our system administrator traced this back to the fact
  >> that these go through all the directories back to "/" , doing an lstat
  >> on everything. He suggests that that seems odd, but it doesn't take long
  >> normally.  The problem was apparently caused by the fact that something
  >> (possible a cdrom) on /mnt had not been unmounted properly.
  >> 
  >> We have fixed the problem but since it was rather difficult to track
  >> down I thought  I would point it out in case others experience a similar
  >> difficulty. Also, is there a good explanation for doing an lstat on
  >> everything up to /?

  > Do you know what was doing it?  Since R CMD build is basically a Perl
  > program, I can only guess that Perl was doing this, and it looks like a
  > Perl quirk/bug that perhaps you need to track down and report (if your Perl
  > version is current).  One thing I did notice is that the R scripts use
  > Cwd::getcwd in Perl when the manual page recommends Cwd::cwd, and reading
  > the code suggests Cwd::getcwd is the culprit.  (Any explanation,
  > Fritz/Kurt?)

No particular reason ... the only one is that I've always used getcwd
(and didn't even know that cwd exists). My manpage says ``It is
recommended that cwd (or another *cwd() function) is used in all code
...'' which I wouldn't take as a particulartly strong recommendation
for cvw, but I'd be fine.

Paul, could you try if that fixes your problem (i.e., replace all
occurrences of ``getcwd'' by ``Cwd::cwd'' in the build script and run
it again)?

Thanks in advance,
Fritz


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[Rd] lstat and NFS server not responding
Friedrich Leisch