R help - Jan 2010 - Maptools runs out of memory installing the help files for spCbind-methods

Hi,
I'd be grateful for help with the following:-

Running R version 2.9.2 (2009-08-24) on Gentoo Linux, on an
x86 PC. I am trying to install maptools, (via CRAN from
maptools_0.7-29.tar.gz'), for the first time.

All runs smoothly until the installation gets to
"*** installing help indices" for spCbind-methods, about two
thirds of the way through the help files, at which point the
installation hangs until R runs out of memory.
The last few lines of the output are :-
"sp2tmap                text    html    latex   example
spCbind-methods        text    html    latex   example
Out of memory!"
and it freezes.

Memory available as reported by
> gc()
         used (Mb) gc trigger (Mb) max used (Mb)
Ncells 133838  3.6     350000  9.4   350000  9.4
Vcells  81771  0.7     786432  6.0   406077  3.1

top, in another shell, reports that I am using almost all
the memory (2G) and almost all the swap (1G)

the command
perl /usr/lib/R/share/perl/build-help.pl --txt --html
--latex is running as well as R.

I tried this on an amd64 Linux system, and got exactly the
same results.

I've never seen this before, and I can't find any similar
issues in the bug tracker, or on the forums.

Any suggestions? Am I missing something that it needs?
Anthony
-- 
Anthony Staines, Professor of Health Systems Research,
School of Nursing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9,Ireland.
Tel:- +353 1 700 7807. Mobile:- +353 86 606 9713

This has been seen on two ubuntu systems, but cannot be reproduced elsewhere
- this is a first report for gentoo. The fix (found by Barry Rowlingson) is
to install with "R CMD INSTALL --no-latex maptools-blah.tar.gz" rather
than
install.packages(), with the comment that perl was taking all available
memory when --no-latex was omitted. As package maintainer, I can't reproduce
this, as I have RHEL/f12 systems rather than Debian-based ones or indeed
gentoo, which here is showing the same behaviour. If someone could offer me
ssh access to a system with problems, I can try to see whether any of the
text in that file or its successor is unpalatable.

Roger




-----
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section
Department of Economics
Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
Helleveien 30
N-5045 Bergen, Norway

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