R devel - Feb 2019 - Is libtiff >= 4.0.0 now required by R for TIFF support?

We recently discovered that since R 3.3.0, on our CentOS 6 based
cluster, R gets built without TIFF support.  The last version where TIFF
support was built, was 3.2.5.

We have libtiff 3.9.4 installed:

$ rpm -q libtiff-devel
libtiff-devel-3.9.4-21.el6_8.x86_64

(Since CentOS 6 is so old, we have manually installed newer versions of
some dependencies: curl 7.46.0, zlib 1.2.8, bzip2 1.0.6, xz 5.2.2 and
pcre 8.38.)

We configure R like this:

BLAS=--with-blas='-mkl=parallel'
LAPACK=--with-lapack
./configure --prefix=$destdir "$BLAS" "$LAPACK"
--enable-BLAS-shlib --enable-R-shlib

(and build with Intel compilers.)



The tiff-related output of the configure script in R 3.2.5 was

$ grep -i tiff _log_3.2.5
checking tiffio.h usability... yes
checking tiffio.h presence... yes
checking for tiffio.h... yes
checking for TIFFOpen in -ltiff... yes
  Additional capabilities:   PNG, JPEG, TIFF, NLS, cairo

Beginning with R 3.3.0, it was just

$ grep -i tiff _log_3.3.0
  Capabilities skipped:      TIFF, ICU

(This has been the output for all versions we've installed since 3.3.0.)



I looked at the configure script, and in 3.2.5, the tests for libtiff
starts like this (I've adjusted the indentation):

if test "${use_libtiff}" = yes; then
    for ac_header in tiffio.h
    do :
	ac_fn_c_check_header_mongrel "$LINENO" "tiffio.h"
"ac_cv_header_tiffio_h" "$ac_includes_default"
	if test "x$ac_cv_header_tiffio_h" = xyes; then :
	    cat >>confdefs.h <<_ACEOF
#define HAVE_TIFFIO_H 1
_ACEOF

From 3.3.0 on, it starts like this (with indentation adjusted):

if test "${use_libtiff}" = yes; then
    mod  ## pkg-config support was introduced in libtiff 4.0.0
  ## I guess the module name might change in future, so
  ## program defensively here.
    if "${PKGCONF}" --exists libtiff-4; then
	mod=libtiff-4
    fi
    if test -n "${mod}"; then
	save_CPPFLAGS=${CPPFLAGS}
	TIF_CPPFLAGS=`"${PKGCONF}" --cflags ${mod}`
	CPPFLAGS="${CPPFLAGS} ${TIF_CPPFLAGS}"
	for ac_header in tiffio.h
	do :
	    ac_fn_c_check_header_mongrel "$LINENO" "tiffio.h"
"ac_cv_header_tiffio_h" "$ac_includes_default"
	    if test "x$ac_cv_header_tiffio_h" = xyes; then :
		cat >>confdefs.h <<_ACEOF
#define HAVE_TIFFIO_H 1
_ACEOF

And all the rest of the tests for libtiff are within the "if test -n
"${mod}"; then" branch.  As I read it, this means that if you
don't have
libtiff >= 4.0.0 installed, the tests for libtiff will not be run, and
support for TIFF disabled.



On the other hand, Appendix A.2 "Useful libraries and programs" in
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-admin.html says

"The bitmapped graphics devices jpeg(), png() and tiff() need the
appropriate headers and libraries installed: jpeg (version 6b or later,
or libjpeg-turbo) or libpng (version 1.2.7 or later) and zlib or libtiff
(any recent version ? 3.9.[4-7] and 4.0.[2-10] have been tested)
respectively."

which seems to imply that libtiff 3.9.4 should be fine.



Is there a bug in the configure script, is the "R Installation and
Administration" not up to date, or is it me that misunderstands
something here?

-- 
Regards,
Bj?rn-Helge Mevik

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On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 11:11 AM Bj?rn-Helge Mevik
<b.h.mevik at usit.uio.no> wrote:
>
> We recently discovered that since R 3.3.0, on our CentOS 6 based
> cluster, R gets built without TIFF support.  The last version where TIFF
> support was built, was 3.2.5.
It looks like the official R from EPEL6 also lacks tiff support:

  yum install epel-release
  yum install R-devel
  R -e 'capabilities()'
> capabilities()
       jpeg         png        tiff       tcltk         X11        aqua
       TRUE        TRUE       FALSE        TRUE       FALSE       FALSE
   http/ftp     sockets      libxml        fifo      cledit       iconv
       TRUE        TRUE        TRUE        TRUE       FALSE        TRUE
        NLS     profmem       cairo         ICU long.double     libcurl
       TRUE       FALSE        TRUE        TRUE        TRUE        TRUE

So your hypothesis that autoconf doesn't find libtiff < 4 is probably
correct.