[RkWard-devel] New website, release 0.3.3

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi Jake,

> I'm trying to build rkward on my FreeBSD-5.4 box, and have run into a
> few snags.  I'm not in front of my box right now so I can't give all
> the details, but here are the general problems:
>
> -rkward-0.3.3 configures, builds, and installs with no error
> messages.  However, when I start it, it doesn't have any icons in the
> toolbar, and only the "settings" and "help" menus appear in the menu
> bar, and those menus don't have all the entries.

Most likely, this is due to a problem with the installation path. One of the 
files needed for building the menus is "rkwardui.rc". For me this is 
installed in /usr/share/apps/rkward. Could you try locating this file on your 
system, and also try to find out, where other KDE applications keep 
their .rc-files (e.g. on my sytem, there is 
also /usr/share/apps/kwrite/kwriteui.rc)? Likely this can be fixed by 
adjusting the --prefix option to ./configure.

> -the only odd thing I noticed during configure is that it doesn't
> detect libpng, when I know I have it.  R detected it just fine when
> configuring.

That is strange, but should not really matter. The configure-mechanism is 
basically that shipped with KDE, libpng is not actually needed to compile 
RKWard.

> -basic R functionality seem to be okay.  I can create vectors, etc.

> but when loading any library I get an error telling me that libR.so
> can't be located (specifically that grDevices.so can't locate
> libR.so).  I know I have libR.so and have provided the correct path
> to it when configuring.  R itself also works as expected from the
> terminal and can load libraries just fine.  FreeBSD seems to like
> things in /usr/local, but I installed R in /usr out of habit.  I'm
> not sure if this has anything to do with it.

Well, and libR.so is required for linking RKWard, so you definitely have it 
installed, indeed. Also, this means, you used the correct option in 
configure. 
There is another separate (run time) setting for the environment variable 
R_HOME. Usually, if this isn't specified correctly, RKWard will exit while 
trying to start the R engine.
My blind guess is, however, that there's something slightly strange about your 
installation of R (maybe to do with /usr and /usr/local), and two different 
settings of R_HOME work at least partially. Please try the following, and 
compare the results:

R RHOME
echo $R_HOME
grep "R_HOME" ~/.kde/share/config/rkwardrc

Should you find any mismatch, you could try to change the R_HOME setting in 
~/.kde/share/config/rkwardrc. Please let me know about the results, as 
probably the mechanim of guessing/detecting the R_HOME in rkward can be 
improved.

> I know this is difficult to troubleshoot, especially since I didn't
> get any errors during the build process, but I would appreciate any
> feedback which would help me to get this working on FreeBSD.  I'm
> wondering if I have some unmet dependencies that don't give errors.
> I don't have PHP installed, but I've built without it on other
> systems with no problems.  R and KDE are both fully installed,
> completely from source.

PHP is not a build dependency, but it is required for all the current plugins. 
So not having PHP installed means that some things will not work. Of course, 
if you don't need that functionality, it's ok to go without PHP. In some 
future version, rkward will give you better feedback on this, and disable the 
plugins needing PHP.

> By the way, I got 0.3.3 working just fine on SLAX.  All previous
> issues resolved with this release.  Good work.

That's good to hear. Thanks!

Thomas