As far as CRAN is concerned, there are two flavors of R on Solaris: one that is built using the Solaris Studio compiler, and one that is built using the GNU/gcc toolchain. The latter is far more up-to-date, but if your package requires it, then your DESCRIPTION file must declare that with the line SystemRequirements: GNU make.
These instructions are for configuring, building, and installing R-devel using the GNU/gcc toolchain (only).
You'll need VMWare Fusion on Mac, or VMWare Workstation (?) on Windows/Linux.
Download the Solaris VM provided by Jeroen Ooms: https://github.com/jeroen/solarisvm
At the time of this writing the link that points to is this one: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9GbYGrVAoVbT25SRFpNeC1mWTQ
The username/password is root/solaris.
Creating a sudo user that can ssh in, will make things easier. By ssh-ing in from your desktop, you'll be able to cut/paste between your desktop and your Solaris prompt, which you can't do through the VMWare screen.
groupadd wheel
mkdir /users
useradd -s /bin/bash -G wheel -d /users/gnuuser -m gnuuser
passwd gnuuserBefore we can ssh in, we need to know the IP address of the VM. Run ifconfig e1000g0 and look at the value of inet; for me it's 172.16.107.203.
From your desktop:
ssh gnuuser@<inet address goes here>su root -c "/opt/csw/bin/pkgutil -y -i sudo; echo gnuuser 'ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL' > /etc/opt/csw/sudoers.d/gnuuser"
echo -e 'export PATH=/opt/csw/bin:$PATH\nexport PS1="\\h:\\W \\u\\$ "' >> ~/.bash_profile && . ~/.bash_profileI don't really know the history here, but it seems like Solaris doesn't have a native package manager like yum/rpm on Red Hat or apt/dpkg on Debian. Jeroen's Solaris VM is configured with pkgutil, which uses packages from opencsw.org; all programs installed this way go into /opt/csw, not into /usr or whatever (hence we had to add /opt/csw/bin to the path in the previous section).
Anyway, we'll install all of the system dependencies we need via pkgutil, and make sure we configure with /opt/csw/lib on the library path.
sudo pkgutil -U
# This can take a VERY long time to download, especially gcc5gfortran.
sudo pkgutil -y -i wget gcc5gfortran libiconv_dev libz_dev liblzma_dev libpcre_dev libcurl_dev gmake libreadline_dev libssh2_dev libcares_dev libssl_dev librtmp_dev openldap_dev libbrotli_dev libkrb5_dev libcairo_dev gfilemkdir -p ~/R
cd ~/R
wget https://stat.ethz.ch/R/daily/R-devel.tar.gz
gzip -dc R-devel.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
cd R-develFirst, we'll modify config.site using mostly values from BDR, plus a couple of changes I found necessary to get the build to succeed.
mv config.site config.site.orig
cat <<-EOF > config.site
# From http://developer.r-project.org/CRAN/QA/BDR/Solaris/x86/gcc-devel/config.site
CC="/opt/csw/bin/gcc"
CFLAGS=-O2
CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/csw/include -I/usr/local/include"
FC="/opt/csw//bin/gfortran"
FFLAGS=-O2
CXX="/opt/csw/bin/g++"
CXXFLAGS=-O2
LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib -L/opt/csw/lib"
R_LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib:/opt/csw/lib:/ripley/developerstudio12.6/lib:/usr/openwin/lib"
EOF
# Loosely based on http://developer.r-project.org/CRAN/QA/BDR/Solaris/x86/gcc-devel/I.USED
# PKG_CONFIG_PATH needs to be set or else cairo won't be found
# /usr/ccs/bin needs to be on the PATH or else ar won't be found
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/csw/lib/pkgconfig LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/csw/lib ./configure -C --with-internal-tzcode --prefix=/opt/R-devel --enable-R-shlib
gmake
sudo gmake installYou can now run R-devel at /opt/R-devel/bin/R! (Be sure to use that path, not just whatever R is on your path, if you want R-devel.)
To use Shiny successfully, you'll need to install the Cairo package. To do so, be sure to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH when launching R:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/csw/lib/pkgconfig LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/csw/lib /opt/R-devel/bin/RIn fact, it may not be a bad idea to add export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/csw/lib/pkgconfig and export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/csw/lib to ~/.bash_profile. And perhaps export PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin as well.