>>>>> Alba Pompeo <albapompeo at gmail.com>
>>>>> on Fri, 29 Jan 2016 08:23:26 -0200 writes:
> Here is my log from 'make check' using an Intel i5 64-bit
> processor - http://pastebin.com/raw/N6SYAuFX Here is
> Isaac's log from 'make check' using an Intel Atom 32-bit
> processor - http://pastebin.com/raw/sey6DEk9
> We are both on Alpine Linux, which uses the musl
> libc. http://www.musl-libc.org/
> Thank you very much.
It probably would have helped to choose a different subject
which I now do.
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 9:54 AM, Alba Pompeo
> <albapompeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello, developers of R.
>>
>> I have been unsuccessfully trying to build R on a musl
>> libc system for the last days. ./configure works, but
>> make fails. The command that errors out is here -
>> http://pastebin.com/raw/UwFRsiqT
>>
>> It was brought to my attention that this is a (very
>> longstanding) abuse of a private glibc symbol in R.
>>
>> In R 3.2.3, it seems that configure is trying to test for
>> it on Linux. It apparently fails to accurately test (as
>> demonstrated by the link error), perhaps because the test
>> program does not actually *use* __libc_stack_end so it
>> gets optimized out. (See line 35500 or so in
>> R-3.2.3/configure.) Ideally, the test program would
>> check that a pointer to __libc_stack_end is non-null, but
>> that's an autoconf bug.
So, ideally someone who knows autoconf much better than I do
should submit a bug report to the autoconf maintainers.
Back to R: I'm not familiar with that part of the code, neither
the configuration, nor the usage (in R/src/unix/system.c ).
However, that code seems to be using a a glibc "feature" widely
available which does help making R startup (a very tiny bit ??)
faster.
>> A work around was to 'export r_cv_libc_stack_end=no'
>> before configuring R.
which *does* solve that problem, right?
>> However, there are a couple little issues with non-ASCII
>> text and a *lot* of math differences, many of which say
>> "*no* convergence: NOTIFY R-core!".
Hmm, I may be off, but these would look like entirely unrelated
with the libc_stack_end availibility, wouldn't they ?
Maybe you / the musl developers should try to make those C
libraries more "standard", notably because I would see math
differences as something pretty grave for R, and indeed, I would
not want to use a platform where R's math functions work
incompatibly with all other platforms ... but maybe I
misunderstand completely.
Hmm... I've found this,
http://wiki.musl-libc.org/wiki/Functional_differences_from_glibc#Floating-point_and_mathematical_library
which make what you say above more relevant/interesting.
Still, from this thread I get that the C source code of R needs
considerable configuration patches before R can work with musl.
But that needs another thread, something like 'Building R with musl'.
>> Until these are resolved, R can't be packaged for
>> distributions that use musl, such as Alpine Linux.
which I agree would not be ideal.
Martin
--
Martin <Maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
http://stat.ethz.ch/people/maechler
Seminar f?r Statistik, ETH Z?rich