install.r, install2.r etc do not fail when a package fails to install about rocker

[cboettig]

Possible solutions here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26244530

Not sure what would be the best approach for patching install.r and install2.r; explicitly testing require for each argument or just failing on warning? If we go with the former, perhaps it would be better to use an entirely new RUN command after the call to install2 just to check if the packages can be loaded?

It would probably be best to implement only for install2.r, turning this behavior on as an option, since it would be harder to support the optional behavior in install.r.

[cboettig]

@eddelbuettel Wondering if we want to install littler from Github now that the development version has a number of features that would be handy here? If so, would it be best to install from a tag?

In a related note, I haven't actually managed to install littler from source successfully. INSTALL suggests the usual ./configure make recipe, but there's no configure script?

[eddelbuettel]

INSTALL is wrong; try git log on it -- it is from 2007. README is therefore dated too.

Run ./bootstrap as README.md suggests.

[cboettig]

hmm, no go:

./bootstrap: line 78: aclocal: command not found

(after installing git, running bash a debian-r-base container)

[eddelbuettel]

Any one of these:

• Look at apt-get build-dep, that's why they exists
• Learn about GNU autoconf and its related tools. This is vanilla stuff.
• Follow the debian/rules file, it encodes all this (with the build dep)
• Or use a binary. You only care about the files in examples/ right now anyway.

[cboettig]

Thanks! Sorry to be dense, of course that worked like a charm.

It's not obvious to me why autoconf isn't installed by apt-get build-dep, but grabbing that as well and ./bootstrap works just fine. Forgot all about the autoconf step for configure.ac -> configure, guess it's been too long since I've built things from source. I'm also a bit confused about the make install, seems to be putting r into usr/local/bin as expected, but ./r in the source directory shows that bootstrap has built the correct version, while r still calls the old version...

Anyway, how do you feel about me installing the Github littler version in debian-r-base Dockerfile?

[cboettig]

Hmm, guess it would be wiser to just wget and symlink the install2.r, installGithub.r and testInstalled.r scripts for now?

[eddelbuettel]

Sorry about the pains. Will update README, INSTALL, ... now. If you can glance at them at some point I'd appreciate it. That was obviously overdue.

Re autoconf: It is probably part of the (virtual) build-essentials package.

Re wget: Yes, either that, or I build a quick local deb we wget and install. Manual wget is probably simpler.

[eddelbuettel]

Turns out bootstrap etc were discussed in INSTALL but further down. Back in the day people started from tarballs, and the release tarball has configure ...

[cboettig]

Fixed by PR #25 . (we'll want to update r-base once the next littler is released though).