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Wow, did I just type "G-CRAN weekly report #4"? Time's flying when |
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you're having fun, *cough*. |
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|
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Alright, so R is a big mess. Sure, you can just issue an R CMD INSTALL |
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to install new packages. R CMD INSTALL gets processed by the R |
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executable, which is a bash script. It detects the second argument is |
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CMD, so it passes control to the INSTALL bash script. But let's say |
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you want to do it the clean way and install new packages directly from |
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within R. |
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|
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So you're in the R shell, and issue install.packages(). Hm, the output |
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looks familiar. The code? Hey, what's this? install.packages actually |
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does a lot of hard work to simply call R CMD INSTALL. That's right, it |
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does the R equivalent of system(). So the magic must be in the INSTALL |
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script, right? Haha, no. The INSTALL bash script seriously issues... |
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an R script. The function is called tools:::.install_packages, and |
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it's a piece of code you can hardly scroll through. Thank god I don't |
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have to maintain this beast. |
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|
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The conclusion? I'm not going to worry about cleanliness and am just |
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calling system()s on the R executables, to avoid getting into internal |
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libraries. To cleanly split the src_compile and src_install phase, I'm |
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first going to build a binary R package from source during |
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src_compile, and then extract that into the image directory in |
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src_install. |
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|
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It took me some time to discover all this, resulting in very little |
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code being written. Oh, and I have some exams these weeks. This really |
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was that one week for me, and as bicatali already told me, it's time I |
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shift into second gear, and this will be my goal for next week, |
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together with building packages. |
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