This Will Only Hurt for a Second

Damn, that was painful!

I've been putting off upgrading the Postgres, R, PL/R setup. Haven't upgraded Ubuntu, either? Went smoothly last time...

Postgres wasn't so bad; still in the 9.x release. No sweat.

R 3.x had some unresolved differences with 2.x, dll hell in Windoze terms, so that was one reason to wait. But Joe just released a new version of PL/R, so must be time. The latest version of R is 3.0.2, so why not?

The R part isn't too bad, only that you have to build from source. No shared library binaries out there. Follow directions, avoid excessive use.

OK, so now PL/R. Just open the tarball into ./contrib/plr, and
make
make install

Fails. Can't find the libR.so. But it's there. I can see it. R_HOME is there, and correct (after some fiddling about deciding where to put it this time.) Joe's instruction tips make it all simple. Still nada.

Turns out that ldconfig on Ubuntu has a (or, some) quirks. The purpose is to setup the linker and libraries. PL/R, at build and runtime, needs to find the R shared library. The final step is to call ldconfig as sudo to do that hand waving.

Still nada. Can't find libR.so for the install.

Turns out that ldconfig/Ubuntu wants a directory in /lib. The details are here. And the only way to discover that is to redirect the output from ldconfig to a file. Then, and so far as I can see only then, does one get the console message that it can't stat the directory. Unlike that poster, this did cause a problem.

Back in business. Much as I dislike both MicroSoft and Apple, admin is generally easier. Well, when I didn't have to hack the Registry. Or use Norton Disk Doctor to rebuild part of the FAT. Ah, those were the days.