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r-devel / rdevguide

A guide for contributing to R core development
https://contributor.r-project.org/rdevguide/
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Update 02-getting_started.Rmd #151

Closed StarTrooper08 closed 1 year ago

StarTrooper08 commented 1 year ago

cmd fix

aitap commented 1 year ago

There's a crucial difference between the install and the build-dep commands. It's described in man apt-get.

An apt-get install r-base-dev will install r-base-dev itself and the packages it "depends upon", i.e. the packages r-base-dev needs in order to run. (If you follow the link, you can see the hard dependencies marked with red circles, but APT can be set up to install additional packages as well.)

An apt-get build-dep r-base-dev will look up the corresponding source package, r-base, and install all packages required to compile it from source. It will not install r-base-dev or any other binary package resulting from compiling r-base.

Granted, in this case the two sets of packages (dependencies of r-base-dev and build-dependencies of src:r-base) have a large intersection, but they do differ. When you're compiling R, you need the latter, not the former. The former is needed when you compile R packages, i.e. when you run install.packages(type = "source"), not R itself. For example, apt build-dep r-base will install libx11-dev, libxt-dev, and headers for Pango and Cairo, which are required to build the x11() device and the few bits of interactive GUI that R has on Unix-like systems. apt install r-base-dev will not get you these packages, and it will also install R (which you were going to compile from source instead).

See also: Debian administrator's handbook, chapters 6.2 and 15.

StarTrooper08 commented 1 year ago

I tried apt-get build-dep r-base-dev but didn't gave me any output like whether it builded package.

But when I tried with install instead of build-dep it worked.

And also gaved me msg that only r-base version can be build using build-dep.

aitap commented 1 year ago

It's hard to give advice without precise error messages, but you may be missing the deb-src directives in your sources.list files, see Debian Handbook 6.1 and 15.1.1. This could be worth mentioning in the guide.

willingc commented 1 year ago

@StarTrooper08 I hope that the guidance given by @aitap helped you. I think the best next step would be to close this PR since apt-get build-dep r-base-dev performs a different task than apt-get install. While I appreciate that you took the time to create a PR, I believe that this change isn't needed at this time.