R devel - Jul 2010 - Possible bug in 2.11.x texmf makefile.in and some related things...

Hi all,

A list of some possible issues:

1. In R 2.11.x, in:

  http://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-2-11-branch/share/texmf/

there are two files, jss.cls and jss.bst (for JSS), which appear to be new since
2.10.x. These files are not installed when building/installing R. It would
appear that they are not included in:

  https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-2-11-branch/share/Makefile.in

The relevant code there is:

  	@for f in $(srcdir)/texmf/*.sty \
		  $(srcdir)/texmf/*.fd; do \
	  $(INSTALL_DATA) $${f} "$(DESTDIR)$(rsharedir)/texmf"; \
	done

which would skip over the two jss files.

This issue came up when another useR (on F12) was building the zoo package with
its vignette, which apparently uses jss.cls. Errors were of course observed. I
thought that the error was limited to Fedora, but this is an issue in the
source.


2. On a related issue, the texmf tree appears to be modified in 2.12.x, with the
latex and bibtex files being put into separate folders:

  https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/texmf/

The makefile.in:

  https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/Makefile.in  

appears to be modified to handle that split:

  	@for f in $(srcdir)/texmf/bibtex/bst/*; do \
	  $(INSTALL_DATA) $${f} "$(DESTDIR)$(rsharedir)/texmf/bibtex/bst"; \
	done
	@for f in $(srcdir)/texmf/tex/latex/*; do \
	  $(INSTALL_DATA) $${f} "$(DESTDIR)$(rsharedir)/texmf/tex/latex"; \
	done


So there was perhaps an oversight of sorts for 2.11.x in handling these two JSS
related files.


3. A final note, which is that the NEWS file appears to be missing from R-Devel
tonight:

  https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/

I was trying to read it to note any comments relevant to the above.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz

On Sun, 4 Jul 2010, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A list of some possible issues:
>
> 1. In R 2.11.x, in:
>
>  http://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-2-11-branch/share/texmf/
>
> there are two files, jss.cls and jss.bst (for JSS), which appear to 
> be new since 2.10.x. These files are not installed when 
> building/installing R. It would appear that they are not included 
> in:
>
>  https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-2-11-branch/share/Makefile.in
>
> The relevant code there is:
>
>  	@for f in $(srcdir)/texmf/*.sty \
> 		  $(srcdir)/texmf/*.fd; do \
> 	  $(INSTALL_DATA) $${f} "$(DESTDIR)$(rsharedir)/texmf"; \
> 	done
>
> which would skip over the two jss files.
>
> This issue came up when another useR (on F12) was building the zoo 
> package with its vignette, which apparently uses jss.cls. Errors 
> were of course observed. I thought that the error was limited to 
> Fedora, but this is an issue in the source.
But there are a fair number of packages which need extra LaTeX files 
to build their vignettes, and e.g. the CRAN test systems have had to 
have these installed for a long time.  Certainly zoo has needed them 
from before 2.11.0, and many believe that a Open Source package needs 
to include copies of such files (see 'Writing R Extensions').
> 2. On a related issue, the texmf tree appears to be modified in 
> 2.12.x, with the latex and bibtex files being put into separate 
> folders:
More precisely, it is a TDS-comformant tree now.
>  https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/texmf/
>
> The makefile.in:
>
>  https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/share/Makefile.in
>
> appears to be modified to handle that split:
>
>  	@for f in $(srcdir)/texmf/bibtex/bst/*; do \
> 	  $(INSTALL_DATA) $${f}
"$(DESTDIR)$(rsharedir)/texmf/bibtex/bst"; \
> 	done
> 	@for f in $(srcdir)/texmf/tex/latex/*; do \
> 	  $(INSTALL_DATA) $${f}
"$(DESTDIR)$(rsharedir)/texmf/tex/latex"; \
> 	done
>
>
> So there was perhaps an oversight of sorts for 2.11.x in handling 
> these two JSS related files.
That's a different hand.  I don't know if the files were intended to 
be installed in 2.11.x: they are in R-devel so eventually packages 
depending on R >= 2.12.0 will be able to rely on them.
> 3. A final note, which is that the NEWS file appears to be missing 
> from R-Devel tonight:
>
>  https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/
>
> I was trying to read it to note any comments relevant to the above.
Correct.  You need to look in 
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/doc/NEWS.Rd
which says

       \item File \file{NEWS} is now generated at installation with a
       slightly different format: it will be in UTF-8 on platforms using
       UTF-8, and otherwise in ASCII.

       \item \file{NEWS} is no longer in the sources, but generated as
       part of the installation.  The primary source for changes is now
       \file{doc/NEWS.Rd}.

A version of the NEWS file will be in the tarballs.
>
> HTH,
>
> Marc Schwartz
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
-- 
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)
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