[Rd] Keeping up to date with R-devel

[Jari Oksanen]

On 27/02/2013, at 18:08 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

> 
> On 27 February 2013 at 17:16, Renaud wrote:
> | Hi,
> | 
> | thanks for the responses.
> | Dirk I found the script you posted once. Can anyone send me a link to the 
> | "beaten to death post"?
> 
> Those were Simon's words, not mine, but I think he referred to the long-ish
> and painful thread here:
> 
>   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.devel/32779
> 
> Feel free to ignore the title, and most assertions by the OP which were never
> replicated by anybody else.  
> 
> The "do not build in src" mantra was repeated a few times, and as I recall
> also refuted once (not by me).  That is not a topic I care much about; I use
> a shortcut, am aware of its (theoretical?) limits but for the casual R CMD
> check use I get out of R-devel never had an issue.
> 
FWIW, I also build in src, at least twice weekly. It is a bit scary to confess this, but I'll duck and cover and I hope they will not catch me. This is a no-no, and if you run in the trouble, you shall not make noise, but you got to clean up your mess all by yourself. I even didn't know about distclean, but I do manual cleaning. When I run in the trouble, the message is usually that there is "no rule to build 'x' from 'z'". So I go to the offending directory (folder for Windows users), check which files are not under version control (svn st), remove those, ./configure && make. It has worked so far. The day it won't work, I'll remove my old src and start from the square one  with a virgin checkout and following the instructions. This has not happened yet, and I have done this for several moths, over a year (I'm afraid that day of destruction is drawing nigh: this abomination must be be stopped). I only do this in my home directory in my office desktop, I don't make install, but I have a symbolic link in ~/bin to the built binary in the build directory so that I can either use the stock R of my system (which still runs in 2.14 series) with stable packages, or experimental R with experimental versions of packages. 

I think the rule is that you can do anything as long as you don't complain. If you want to complain, you must follow the instructions. 

Cheers, Jari Oksanen
--
Jari Oksanen, Dept Biology, Univ Oulu, 90014 Finland