The new staged package installation shells out to the 'file' utility on Unix systems: https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/31ee14c620eb1b939acd322f3b5617f998aab8e8/src/library/tools/R/install.R#L578
Although 'file' is usually present on most Unix systems, it might be missing from small Docker containers, where the aim is to make the container as small possible. The magic file of 'file' is about 5MB, so that is significant in this case. R uses 'file' to decide if a .so, .dll, etc. file is indeed a shared library, and (as I understand) if it is, it then goes on to try to fix the hardcoded installation path in it, using an os specific tool. As the second part needs to handle errors anyway, I wonder if it would make sense to skip the 'file' call completely, after all it is quite unlikely that a .dll or .so, etc. file is _not_ a shared library, and even if it is not, the errors will be caught later. Thanks, Gabor ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel