Rccp.h not found in Renjin when compiling package

Question

I want to compile the units package in Renjin, which currently does not work in the online repository, see http://packages.renjin.org/package/org.renjin.cran/units/0.6-3/build/5

• I created a pom.xml for the current release of udunits, see https://github.com/nuest/renjin-docker/blob/master/geospatial-packages/units/pom.xml
• I built a Dockerfile for compiling packages and having the required compilers, see https://github.com/nuest/renjin-docker/blob/master/0.9.2726/Dockerfile.builder
• Within a container created from an image built from that Dockerfile, I can run library('org.renjin.cran:Rcpp') in an R session, but when I run mvn clean install on units I get the following error:

[...]

Downloaded: https://nexus.bedatadriven.com/content/groups/public/org/sonatype/aether/aether-impl/1.13.1/aether-impl-1.13.1.jar (128 KB at 7.4 KB/sec)
EXECUTING: -print-file-name=plugin
EXECUTING: -shared -xc++ -I/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/4.7/plugin/include -fPIC -fno-rtti -O2 plugin.c -lstdc++ -shared-libgcc -o /packages/units/units/target/bridge.so
configure: units: 0.6-4
Warning: unsupported configuration variable CFLAGS
Warning: unsupported configuration variable CPPFLAGS
Warning: unsupported configuration variable LDFLAGS
Warning: unsupported configuration variable CXXFLAGS
checking whether the C++ compiler works... yes
checking for C++ compiler default output file name... a.out
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... yes
checking whether g++-4.7 accepts -g... yes
checking how to run the C++ preprocessor... g++-4.7 -E
checking for grep that handles long lines and -e... /bin/grep
checking for egrep... /bin/grep -E
checking for ANSI C header files... yes
checking for sys/types.h... yes
checking for sys/stat.h... yes
checking for stdlib.h... yes
checking for string.h... yes
checking for memory.h... yes
checking for strings.h... yes
checking for inttypes.h... yes
checking for stdint.h... yes
checking for unistd.h... yes
checking for stdbool.h that conforms to C99... yes
checking for _Bool... no
checking for error_at_line... yes
checking for gcc... gcc-4.7
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc-4.7 accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc-4.7 option to accept ISO C89... none needed
checking for XML_ParserCreate in -lexpat... no
checking udunits2.h usability... yes
checking udunits2.h presence... yes
checking for udunits2.h... yes
checking for ut_read_xml in -ludunits2... yes
configure: creating ./config.status
config.status: creating src/Makevars
Checking wether in Makevars CXX_STD is set to CXX11... no
g++-4.7 -I/packages/units/units/target/gnur/include -DNDEBUG -DUDUNITS2_DIR=0    -I"/packages/units/units/target/include"    -fpic  -m32 -fplugin=/packages/units/units/target/bridge.so -DRENJIN  -fno-inline-functions  -fdisable-tree-einline -g  -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g  -c udunits.cpp -o udunits.o
cc1plus: note: disable pass tree-einline for functions in the range of [0, 4294967295]
udunits.cpp:11:18: fatal error: Rcpp.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
/packages/units/units/target/gnur/etc/Makeconf:202: recipe for target 'udunits.o' failed
make: *** [udunits.o] Error 1
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 02:20 min
[INFO] Finished at: 2019-11-15T15:27:52+00:00
[INFO] Final Memory: 17M/445M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.renjin:renjin-maven-plugin:0.9.2726:gnur-compile (gnur-compile) on project units: Compilation of GNU R sources failed: Failed to execute Makefile -> [Help 1]
[ERROR] 
[ERROR] To see the full stack trace of the errors, re-run Maven with the -e switch.
[ERROR] Re-run Maven using the -X switch to enable full debug logging.
[ERROR] 
[ERROR] For more information about the errors and possible solutions, please read the following articles:
[ERROR] [Help 1] http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/MojoExecutionException
root@987c61d45fbf:/packages/units/units# exit

Anyone an idea how to tell Renjin where to find Rcpp.h ?

More details on the resources I consulted are in this GitHub issue: https://github.com/nuest/renjin-docker/issues/4

Answer 1

If you're using Maven to build the package, you also need to add Rcpp headers as a dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.renjin.cran</groupId>
  <artifactId>Rcpp</artifactId>
  <version>0.12.13-renjin-15</version>
  <classifier>headers</classifier>
  <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

You can use the pom file for plyr as an example.

Note that if you just want to build a package for use with Renjin, the command line tool is far simpler:

renjin build units

This will take care of downloading the required dependencies and producing a jar file.

Do note that Renjin does not support packages which depend on external native libraries. You can see from the automated build logs that the units package will fail because of a dependency on udunits2.

That is the reason that the units packages is labeled as incompatible in our package site.