It seems to me when people update packages, they do not always do this too
carefully, and leave unnecessary things from previous versions around.
I've just been looking through the R installation manual
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.pdf
and noticed a few things that are interesting and not properly covered in R's
spkg-install.
* On Linux: "There are known problems with several early versions of gcc 4, but
gcc 4.1.0 and later have been tested extensively."
That would suggest to me we should insist on at least gcc 4.1.0 on Linux.
(Currently prereq insists on gcc 4.0.1 on all platforms).
* There is a patch applied to the R sources. Nobody answered my request to know
whether this is still needed or not.
* R defaults to a paper size of A4. Quite what that will effect I do not know,
but certainly producing manuals. I'm personally happy with A4, but not everyone
will be.
* There's no longer any option to disable iconv, despite there is one in
spkg-install.
* There is no option to specify the location of iconv in R, despite a comment in
spkg-install that this option is not working on FreeBSD. Perhaps there was such
an option in a previous version of R.
* About Fortran, the manual says: "The default FFLAGS chosen (by autoconf) for a
GNU FORTRAN compiler is ‘-g -O2’. This seems not to be documented for gfortran,
and has caused problems (segfaults and infinite loops) on ‘x86_64’ Linux (and
the optimizer will be shared with other platforms on that CPU type). A maximum
optimization of ‘-O’ is recommended there."
* There are several additional libraries that will be used and provide higher
performance.
The manual is 65 pages long, and probably not nice bedtime reading, but there is
a wealth of useful information in there. Much of it suggests to me that R's
spkg-install could do with a closer examination.
Dave
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