The CRAN package check page now shows results on Sparc Solaris 10
using a server donated by Sun.
This box tests several different aspects from the existing Intel-based
test boxes:
- the CPU is big-endian.
- it does not have extended-precision doubles in FPU registers. (It
does support long doubles if selected explicitly.)
- the C/C++ header set is from a different tradition.
- the Sun Studio compiler is used (as has been on one of the Linux
boxes, and we may phase the latter out in due course).
- the toolset is AT&T-based Unix rather than GNU or BSD. In
particular Solaris make, sed and tar and an actual Bourne shell are
used.
There is only a limited set of additional software installed. A few
things have had to be compiled with gcc, notably the packages using
Gtk+ (and Solaris' own installation of Gtk+ is too old for RGtk2) and
MCMCpack.
The server does not have a graphics card and this is causing some
problems with the X11 installation, including bitmap devices and rgl,
that we are still working on.
Amongst the package issues shown up are
- unterminated final lines in src/Makevars[.in] cause failures.
- there are many packages which require GNU make and fail to declare
it. These include Cairo JavaGD Rcpp RcppExamples RInside farmR
highlight phyclust png rJava.
- the assumption that 'tar' accepts compressed archives (gdata).
- 60-odd C++ -using packages are not correct C++, often because they
use GNU extensions or have missing headers (and C++ requires headers
for prototypes), or use C99 functions that are not in C++ and hence
not in the headers when used from C++ -- Solaris is rather strict
about the latter.
Brian Ripley
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
