On 28 March 2018 at 19:47, Ogan Mancarci wrote: | I have been looking for ways to use shared libraries in packages in CRAN | and be able to write tests for them.
Well the basic problem here is that shared libraries are in fact provided by the _operating system_ and hence you just introduced an OS dependency. | When installing packages that depend on shared libraries, if a library is | missing from the system we often get a nice error message complaining about | the missing library during installation and listing what to install on Really? If so it clearly is due to someone (maybe configure, maybe ad hoc script) testing for such a requuired library. | different linux builds, what to install on windows and mac. Similarly, how | can I fail during installation if a required shared library is missing and | show a warning to the users directing them to install it? By writing a test. | More importantly, if I want to write tests and examples for the package, | how do I tell CRAN that it needs to have the shared library? To a first approximation, if you need "foo" and CRAN does not have "foo" then your package is borked, will not build, and hence get rejected. Now, this was a brief email. There are A MILLION details we could discuss here. One possible example is nloptr: - on windows, it required nlopt to be present, and to point to it via an environment library - on systems with an X it tests, uses an system shared library if present, and if not downloads the sources - at least that is what old versions did; the current -dev version switched to (AFAIK) either using system or using embedded sources. In short, what you're after is the hardest possibly deployment path given the cross-OS use of R. No shortcuts. But it is worth sorting this out. A few other packages, and this is the right list. Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
