I'm not too happy with this either, but I believe the reason is that there would be a significant extra maintenance burden consisting of things that is not being used by R itself. In particular, complex math routines are little used and have historically caused a number of issues with correct argument and return-value passing.
Notice that it is a bit of a can of worms involving matching up C and Fortran compilers, OS versions, routines being and not being present in current LAPACK, which may differ from the system-supplied one, etc. -pd > On 26 Mar 2018, at 07:49 , Baptiste Auguie <baptiste.aug...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > Why doesn't R include a full Lapack but only a subset? > > My cda package (now archived) relying on RcppArmadillo has broken multiple > times on CRAN over the past few years following updates in the underlying > Armadillo library, Every time it follows the same pattern: Armadillo adds a > function to solve a specialised linear system more efficiently, and the > corresponding Lapack routine is not included in the R Lapack subset used on > CRAN, causing breakage. The workaround so far has been an unhappy > compromise with Armadillo developers, adding a "crippled lapack" flag in > the RcppArmadillo configure script, that triggers the use of alternative > (suboptimal) routines and passes CRAN checks. Most RcppArmadillo-dependent > packages don't see the problem; mine seems to be the only one using complex > linear algebra. Two years ago a large number of Lapack routines were added* > to R, and this nicely solved the issue for a while. Unfortunately the same > problem resurfaced last year, with another missing Lapack routine, and my > package is now archived (though it works fine with an external Lapack). > More generally, this workaround is not satisfying for various reasons, and > so I want to ask: why does R ship only a subset of Lapack in the first > place? > > Best regards, > > baptiste > > * Relevant commit at > https://github.com/wch/r-source/commit/98acd96f22eb795a933879c0d3f740e802855473 > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel -- Peter Dalgaard, Professor, Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Phone: (+45)38153501 Office: A 4.23 Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
