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

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 6 July 2010 at 12:03, Douglas Bates wrote:
| 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.

I have a working Windows setup at work (for various definitions of
working). If we define a snapshot, I could wrap up a package for you.
 
| 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. :-)

:-)  

I work in that environment too, most of the time. 

-- 
  Regards, Dirk