R devel - Feb 2015 - The Environment variables settings in bin/R, why do they ignore environment variables of the same name?

Hello,

In installation/R/bin/R i notice

1. R_HOME_DIR is hard coded e.g.
R_HOME_DIR=/usr/local/lib64/R

2. It ignores R_HOME_DIR

echo "WARNING: ignoring environment value of R_HOME"

3. R_SHARE_DIR, R_INCLUDE_DIR and R_DOC_DIR are also hard coded.

Is there a reason why these  settings do not read the values from the
environment variables of the same name (assuming they exist) and
defaulting to these hard coded values in case they dont?

Regards
Saptarshi

On 26 February 2015 at 16:20, Saptarshi Guha wrote:
| In installation/R/bin/R i notice
| 
| 1. R_HOME_DIR is hard coded e.g.
| R_HOME_DIR=/usr/local/lib64/R
| 
| 2. It ignores R_HOME_DIR
| 
| echo "WARNING: ignoring environment value of R_HOME"
| 
| 3. R_SHARE_DIR, R_INCLUDE_DIR and R_DOC_DIR are also hard coded.
| 
| Is there a reason why these  settings do not read the values from the
| environment variables of the same name (assuming they exist) and
| defaulting to these hard coded values in case they dont?

AFAICR you supposed to deal with this via $PATH and just pick one:

Ie with

  edd at max:~$ grep ^R_HOME_DIR /usr/lib/R/bin/R /usr/local/lib/R-devel/bin/R
  /usr/lib/R/bin/R:R_HOME_DIR=/usr/lib/R
  /usr/local/lib/R-devel/bin/R:R_HOME_DIR=/usr/local/lib/R-devel/lib/R
  edd at max:~$ 

I get, respectively,

  edd at max:~$ R --version | head -1
  R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31) -- "Pumpkin Helmet"
  edd at max:~$ PATH="/usr/local/lib/R-devel/bin/:$PATH" R --version |
head -1
  R Under development (unstable) (2015-02-22 r67876) -- "Unsuffered
Consequences"
  edd at max:~$ 

and I have R-devel aliased to RD and R-devel in /usr/local/bin.

Dirk

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

On 27 Feb 2015, at 01:20 , Saptarshi Guha <saptarshi.guha at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> In installation/R/bin/R i notice
> 
> 1. R_HOME_DIR is hard coded e.g.
> R_HOME_DIR=/usr/local/lib64/R
> 
> 2. It ignores R_HOME_DIR
> 
> echo "WARNING: ignoring environment value of R_HOME"
> 
> 3. R_SHARE_DIR, R_INCLUDE_DIR and R_DOC_DIR are also hard coded.
> 
> Is there a reason why these  settings do not read the values from the
> environment variables of the same name (assuming they exist) and
> defaulting to these hard coded values in case they dont?
Yes. The R installation knows what the values should be and you do not.
Especially if you have multiple version of R installed, you'd get yourself
into a rotten mess otherwise.

As I recall it, this logic was introduced years ago after instances of people
building (say) r-devel from source and finding that it wouldn't run, the
reason being that it was looking for system files in the wrong place (and as the
relevant contents of the $R_HOME subdirectories only changed rarely, people had
been getting away with it for a long time until we "suddenly broke
r-devel").

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com