[Rcpp-devel] Rcpp 0.8.3 and those other operating systems

[Douglas Bates]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 11:44 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 6 July 2010 at 11:11, Douglas Bates wrote:
> | The lme4a package currently depends on Rcpp_0.8.3 and uses some
> | "sugar" constructions - but only in a few places and I could replace
> | those with explicit loops or calls to std::transform fairly easily.
> |
> | I see that Rcpp_0.8.3 is available on CRAN as the source code package
> | but the Windows and OS X binaries are still at 0.8.2
> |
> | Furthermore the nightly R-forge builds of lme4a are failing on Windows
> | and OS X when they hit a sugar construction.
> |
> | Would I be well-advised to back out the use of Rcpp sugar if I want to
> | have a package available for the tutorial preceding useR!2010?  It is
> | not a big deal to do that but still it is something I would prefer to
> | avoid if Windows and Mac OS X builds of 0.8.3 are just around the
> | corner.
>
> That's a somewhat complicated issue right now, but hopefully not for long.
>
> "Sugar" started really only good post-0.8.2. And with the Rmetrics meeting
> coming up, and a larger than usual set of changes, we released 0.8.3 right
> before that meeting. At the time Rcpp passed on all systems we could test on.
> We do nto release when we know of failures. [ Hint: If only we already had
> "bin-builder" ... ].
>
> But once released, it turned out that Solaris didn't build, and that OS X
> failed with ppc (we couldn't test that, as we have x86 only). And worst of
> all, Uwe is getting tired of the odd and still unexplained build issues on
> 'doze and has pushed us to the back of the bus.  So that means we lack Win,
> OS X, Solaris.  Mind you even though it builds almost everywhere, but because
> we have an obsessively large number of unit tests, something sometimes breaks
> somewhere. I think I just fixed something for Windoze related to Dates and a
> Windows braindeadness. And we're working on bulk compiles for the tests so
> that we no longer run up against Uwe's time limit.
>
> Now, you seem to define "ready" as "being used on R-Forge" and that depends
> on the binaries -- which aren't there for the reasons discussed above.

> We may get 0.8.4 out in a bit.  We probably want that befoer useR! ourselves.
> But whether that migrates through to give you your packages -- dunno.

> At the end of the day, maybe you just have to dive in and build lme4a and
> Rcpp locally. I presume you only really need two types of binaries, win32 and
> OS X/x86. Can you just do those and have people install off a web page / ftp
> site?

That is a reasonable suggestion if i were willing to mess around with
Windows long enough to install the tools for building packages, etc.
However, my patience for working on Windows runs out after about 5
minutes and I think it will be easier on computers and people near me
if I just create a version of lme4a that will compile against
Rcpp_0.8.2.

You see I work on Ubuntu or Debian systems all the time and there is
this marvelous guy named Dirk who makes it so simple to install the
packages and the build environment etc. there that i am rather
spoiled. :-)



> --
>  Regards, Dirk
>
>