I'm building RPM packages and I want to output a message to the console after installing the package. In this message, there are some pointers for the person who is installing the package.
Can someone show me how to do this in the spec file?
It depends on what you mean with the console...
You can print some message in the %post or even %posttrans section. This output will be shown on the console when the user installs your package using rpm, yum, dnf, zypper or similar on the command line. When the user uses any graphical interface, he won't see that message (or not easily).
If you want to decide in which section to print your message and under what conditions, this is a great resource on the scriptlet order and their arguments.
You can write to STDERR (there's an example in this answer). However, client interaction upon installation is pretty much impossible by design. For example, if your RPMs were added to a Kickstart script for an automated installation, the output would never be seen.
A much better paradigm is to do what they do for things like Apache where they drop in a default configuration (easily done with symlinks in your %post) that present some kind of sample interface with "additional configuration is required..."
Related
is there any way to play inform7 from the command line? I'd like to write some automated test script that plays the play with certain commands and don't want to do it manually. Is there any way to do that?
This is easiest to do with the CLI Linux package of Inform 7. It contains a perl CLI script you can run, but you may also like to consider this alternative script I wrote: https://github.com/i7/kerkerkruip/blob/master/tools/build-i7-project
You can invoke this with
build-i7-project -p "Project Folder"
(Leave off the .inform.)
You can also run the binaries which are installed with the IDE packages by themselves instead of installing the CLI Linux package. The command line options are probably mostly the same in other operating systems, but you may need to change them slightly. If you can't get it to work, compare with what the Inform 7 IDE says when you build with it.
If what you really want to do is periodically run some test scripts that verify that your work is still performing as expected, then Inform 7 has the capability do do that from within the IDE. Take a look at chapter 24.2 of Writing with Inform for details. In combination with good use of the Skein, this should handle the more common unit-testing requirements.
Of course, if you're doing something more outré, running bash scripts from the command line may wind up being the way to go. Still, don't do any more work than you have to. :)
I am developing a package and I would like to know what is the best way to execute a script at installation time.
Essentially I want to make sure that third-party tools are installed,
retrieve them when I can and raise an error if some dependency is missing.
I am not referring only to R packages, but also to system-wide headers, fonts and similar dependencies.
What is the best strategy to follow in this case?
Scripts to be run before installation should be placed in an executable file called configure (will be executed on Linux/Unix/Mac computers) or in a file called configure.win (will be executed in Windows computers).
The default R library, .Library, is normally not writeable under Windows.
You need to run R as Administrator. For new packages you can set and use a personal library, but this doesn't work when updating packages in the base setup (e.g. by update.packages()).
If you forget (or don't know you need) to run as Administrator, you get duplicate versions of the same packages, messing the installation.
I think one solution could be copying all packages to a personal library and disabling the default one. I know how to add a new library path to R, i.e. .libPaths ("my/path"), but how to remove the default library from .libPaths ()?
Update for non-Windows users
Some clarifications might help mostly non-Windows R users to understand the mentioned problem.
In Windows "Log on as Administrator" (or better as a user belonging to administrators' group) and "Run as Administrator" are quite different things.
In the former case you just give your credentials at logon, much like in Linux; in the latter you are already logged as a "superuser", but in order to carry out a potentially dangerous action, you have to ask an ad hoc permission to Windows (proving that it's you and not a malware acting).
That's said, programs (and developers), before accessing known Windows' protected objects (i.e. C:\Program Files folder), ask permission to the user to avoid being blocked by the OS.
Even when they don't ask (because they assume the knowledgeable user should give this permission in advance), failure to access is normally reported like "Permission denied to access to folder etc.".
As for R version 3.0.2, update.packages() involves one of the situations, where an elevated permission request should be triggered, because this might involve writing to protected program folders. Unfortunately R doesn't ask and cannot update the directory with old packages.
What about the second safe net: user notifications? While install.packages() gives messages like:
stop ... "'lib' element %s is not a writable directory" ...
and you get the idea of a permission problem, with others functions, such as update.packages(), you get:
warning ... "package '%s' in library '%s' will not be updated"
whose causes can be everything.
Can this scenario be even worse? Yes. Besides not asking for permission to write to "Program Folders", besides not issuing a notification of the permission error, update.packages(), when unable to update packages in protected folders, actually installs them to the personal user folder, but without notifying this. This is similar to what install.packages() does, except that the latter notifies and asks permission to do this.
So you end up with two versions of the same packages in different folders! Your calculations will be therefore dependent on library priorities.
Can this scenario be even worse? Yes. You are clever (or Google) enough to understand that you need to "Run as Administrator", when you want to update packages. You restart R as Administrator and hope this will fix everything. Not at all. R sees the updated packages in the personal library and does not act. So you remain with two versions of the same packages.
To solve this you have to detect duplicate packages and remove them manually, then restart R as administrator and update again (or write a script to do this).
Clearly the solution would be R conforming to Windows apps expected behaviour, or at least do nothing when prevented to act (instead of taking non-notified decisions).
In the meantime I think that totally disabling the default library (located in a protected area) would be a temporary workaround.
A final note. Packages and package updating are crucial for using R, so my humble opinion is that the topic should deserve specific careful attention even for less GNU-blessed systems like Windows.
One solution is to change R_LIBS environment variable. You can see for example this question.
But If you don't have admin rights, you can specify location when you load the package:
library(my_package, lib.loc="my/path")
This is sort of related to a previous post of mine. I have the need to use the bigmemory library on my 32bit Windows PC to do some ugly matrix calculations. Unfortunately, it appears that the maintainers have temporarily ceased production of Windows binaries. I have Ubuntu on my home PC. I would really like to take the .tar.gz file and build it into a Windows binary that I can actually run at work. I realize there are more efficient ways, like installing RTools on the Windows device. However, our IT keeps our admin rights on lockdown, so I can never edit my PATH enviro variable. Could anyone provide some general guidance for doing this? Are there any tools I need to install on my Ubuntu PC above and beyond R?
I found similar questions, but nothing that thoroughly answered my questions.
Unless the package source is incompatible with current versions of R, you could use the R project's win-builder site to build a Windows binary. Quoting from the linked site, win-builder is a service:
intended for useRs who do not have Windows available for checking and building Windows binary packages.
As a convenience, Hadley Wickham's devtools package includes a utility function, build_win(), that you can use for this purpose. From ?build_win:
Works by building source package, and then uploading to http://win-builder.r-project.org/>. Once building is complete you'll receive a link to the built package in the email address listed in the maintainer field. It usually takes around 30 minutes.
Windows has four sets of environment variables (system, user, volatile and process sets). The first three sets are stored in the registry but the process set is not so even if they have locked down the registry its typically still possible to set the process environment variables (including the PATH) in a local process, i.e. on a temporary basis, so you might double check your assumptions that you can't modify anything. Its more likely that you can't modify the system variables and registry but can still modify the set in your local process. To check this from the Windows cmd line enter this:
set mytest=123
set mytest
and if the second line shows that mytest has the value 123 then you likely have all the permissions you need.
Furthermore anything you need to set is all handled automatically for you by R.bat in the batchfiles distribution so you don't have to set anything yourself.
Just ensure that Rtools and R are installed into the standard locations (you can tell them to skip the setting of any registry keys during the installation process), ensure R.bat is on your path or in current directory and run:
R.bat CMD INSTALL mypackage.tar.gz
without setting environment variables, registry keys or path.
If that does not work try Rpathset.bat also from the batchfiles which is not automatic like R.bat but on the other hand is extremely flexible since you must modify the SET statments in it to whatever you want.
There is a PDF document that comes with the batchfiles which gives more info.
I've been working on a program called RoboJournal for a long time. The next release has full documentation included; Whenever the user presses F1 or clicks the Help item in the RoboJournal program, the help file is displayed in Qt Assistant (way classier than simply opening a browser window to some online documentation).
In its base form, the documentation consists of lots of loose HTML and image files included in the source package. These loose files are supposed to be compiled into a QCH compiled help file and QHC collection file during build time so Qt Assistant can display the documentation properly. On Windows, this was fairly easy because I was able to write a batch script to automate the entire build process (including compiling the documentation and moving the output files to the right place).
On Linux, it's a bit more complicated. True, I could write a Bash or Perl script that compiles the documentation along with the rest of the program but I have no guarantee that the people who will eventually create my app's Debian packages from the source package I give them will use the script. The source package is used to create all the Debian packages so everything has to work flawlessly with the standard build procedure (or the source package is worthless). Therefore, I need the compile process to produce the same results whether the user runs the script or not. As it is now, the user has to build and install the documentation manually. Surely there's some way to automate this.
Is it possible to have Qmake add instructions to run qcollectiongenerator to the makefile (in order to build my application's help files) so it gets handled properly during the "make" step? That way, the QHC and QCH files will be ready to install to their proper locations (in my case, /usr/share/doc/robojournal-0.4.1) along with everything else when the user runs "make install". I've considered compiling the QCH and QHC files in advance and providing them in the source package but the whole point of building from source is to be able to re-create the entire app from its base components.
I know I probably have to add additional instructions to my .PRO file but I’m not sure what or how. I've found something that looks promising (http://www.qtcentre.org/archive/index.php/t-49484.html) and gives me hope that it's possible for Qmake to do what I need but I’m not sure how applicable those instructions are to my situation. Do I have to create a PRI file just for this or can I add the instructions directly to the main project file?
You can try to use the QMAKE_POST_LINK variable:
QMAKE_POST_LINK += build_help.sh
P.S.
I have no guarantee that the people who will eventually create my
app's Debian packages from the source package I give them will use the
script.
I think this is really not your problem :) It's up to them to properly build the package.