[Phylobase-devl] New phylobase build approach using static libncl (Was: Rcpp and OS X compiliation)

[Mark Holder]

Hi all,

> On Feb 27, 2010, at 11:55 AM, François Michonneau wrote:
>
>> If I remember correctly, none of the nexus files that are included in
>> the package work (pkg/inst/nexusfiles). The only file that I can get
>> to work is the example file that's on the NCL website
>> (http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/ncl/#readerdata).
>
> There is definitely some weirdness going on.  I tried to debug this  
> a little bit, but the fix and rebuild the whole package cycle to  
> test is pretty tedious.  Are there suggestions for how to shorten it  
> up?  Using R CMD SHLIB on a single file and trying to load that  
> (unsurprisingly) doesn't work.  I attempted briefly to build a  
> standalone NCL program to check the output, but my C++ isn't good  
> enough to make this practical.  Is there such a program out there,  
> with available source for us to study from?

I'm no good with R.  So I just took the NCLInterface .h and .cpp from  
phylobase and committed them as an example file in NCL.  That should  
make it easier (at least for me) to test.

Those cloned files now live at:
	https://ncl.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ncl/branches/v2.1/example/phylobaseinterface
in the NCL repo.


I can work with that code and make it more forgiving.  The NEXUS files  
that are in the phylobase repo are not strict-NEXUS.  But they are  
*very* common "dialects."  NCL will handle them, but the BASICCMDLINE  
example program that Brian and Derrick used as a starting point for  
NCLInterface.cpp is not sophisticated enough to allow NCL to work in  
non-strict mode.

I should be able to fix that aspect of things tomorrow.  When I push  
those changes to NCL, I'll post to this list so that someone with  
write permissions to phylobase's svn repo can copy those changes into  
the phylobase.



> The inst/nexusfiles folder contains: co1.nex, MultiLineTrees.nex,  
> treepluscharV01.nex
>
> The first two didn't work, but the last one partially works.  I get  
> a tree that looks like expected, but there is something clearly off  
> with the data portion.
>
> 1. readNexus(file, type=all) returns a phylo4 instead of a phylo4d
> 2. readNexus(file, type=data) returns the following dataframe  
> regardless of what file it's called on (I tried to do a search on  
> the whole package for "Girth" but didn't find anything).   Even a  
> non-nexus file produces this output.


The "Girth" dataframe that you are seeing is what you see. If you  
launch R and type "trees"  Apparently a trees dataset ships with R.

My guess is that:
	1. a phylobase calls fail:
	2. not all failures are being detected,
	3. A local variable called "trees" in the readNexus function scope is  
not created,
	4. subsequent code refers to "trees", and R eventually maps this name  
to the trees data set.

Just a guess.  Surely, R has some way to restrict name scoping to  
within a function, to prevent this type of cryptic behavior (right?)




> Lastly, is there a way to control the output though Rcpp or  
> otherwise, a fair bit of what appears to be stderr gets printed in  
> the R console, it'd be nice to control this.

The BASICCMDLINE implementation writes lots of status output to the  
standard error stream.  When I work with it tomorrow, I can make its  
chattiness controllable by an argument.



all the best,
Mark