R devel - Mar 2014 - Bundling vendor library inside a package

If I have a vendor library (say libvendor.so) that I want my package to
link to, what is the "right way" to bundle that inside my package? My
ideal
outcome would be that the package can be installed from tarball without
having to worry about installing anything to /usr/lib or tweaking some
systemwide variables. This isn't for public distribution so I'm not
worried
about CRAN restrictions or licensing issues. I'm running R 3.0.2 on Linux.

I've put the library in the inst directory of my package, and provided
PKG_LIBS=-L../inst -lvendor. That works for compilation but then I need to
provide LD_LIBRARY_PATH for R to find the library at runtime.

This seems like it must be a common problem, but after hours of Googling I
haven't seen a straightforward answer.

Thanks in advance,
John

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

On 6 March 2014 at 10:56, John Laing wrote:
| If I have a vendor library (say libvendor.so) that I want my package to
| link to, what is the "right way" to bundle that inside my package?
My ideal
| outcome would be that the package can be installed from tarball without
| having to worry about installing anything to /usr/lib or tweaking some
| systemwide variables. This isn't for public distribution so I'm not
worried
| about CRAN restrictions or licensing issues. I'm running R 3.0.2 on Linux.
| 
| I've put the library in the inst directory of my package, and provided
| PKG_LIBS=-L../inst -lvendor. That works for compilation but then I need to
| provide LD_LIBRARY_PATH for R to find the library at runtime.

As it is a local package, you could use the 'rpath' directive to encode
the
path to you vendor library in the shared library object which your package
creates.  
>From http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries.html
   One link option you might use is ld's ``rpath'' option, which
specifies
   the runtime library search path of that particular program being
   compiled. From gcc, you can invoke the rpath option by specifying it this
   way: 
      -Wl,-rpath,$(DEFAULT_LIB_INSTALL_PATH)
   If you use this option when building the library client program, you
don't
   need to bother with LD_LIBRARY_PATH (described next) other than to ensure
   it's not conflicting, or using other techniques to hide the library. 

It work as long as you never change the underlying path. Which is a fine
assumption as long you use the same R installation path -- which is quite
likely. 

Dirk

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com