Installation Instructions

These instructions for installing Sxslt have been gathered from experiences with Solaris and Linux, specifically Yellow Dog Linux. In all cases, we have had a very up-to-date collection of Gnome tools and libxml (2.4.1) and libxslt (1.0.1) and higher. We have not tried porting this to Windows yet at all. Your mileage may vary and we would be very grateful to hear of any problems, patches for the configuration process, etc. so that others can benefit from the different experiences.
  • Requirements
    Install libxslt version 1.0.1 or higher
    This will require libxml2-2.4.*
    It is simplest if you do a full system installation of libxml2 and then configure and compile libxslt. You do not need to install libxslt, as this package needs access to the libxslt source code anyway in order to compile some of the code. However, if you do not install it, you will have to set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to find the libxslt libraries. So, the simplest thing to do is install libxslt as well (and run /sbin/ldconfig or wherever it is on your machine).

    For those users who do not have root permissions with which to install software in standard places on the system, the simplest thing to do is to compile and install libxml2 and libxslt into a sub-directory within one's own home directory. To do this, for example into the directory $HOME/local, specify the argument 

     --prefix='${HOME}/local'
    to the configure scripts for both libxml2 and libxslt. Then, run the commands make and make install in both, having added $HOME/local/bin to your path. (This is needed when installing libxslt so that it can find the xml2-config script needed to configure it.)
  • Telling Sxslt where libxslt is
    Set the environment variable XSLT_HOME to the fully-qualified name of the directory in which you un-tarred the libxslt distribution. Alternatively, you can specify this directory as a command line argument in the call to R CMD INSTALL as 
     --configure-args='--with-xslt=/the/directory'
    That directory should contain the subdirectories libxslt, libexslt and libxslt/.libs and libexslt/.libs.
  • Ensure that R is compiled as a shared library.
  • Install this R package in the usual manner 
      R CMD INSTALL -c Sxslt
    • Note that in the future, we hope to be able to work from a fully installed version of libxslt. However, not all the header files that we need are installed during that process. Specifically, we copy the C source code that runs xsltproc and modify it to load the R engine. That source file requires additional header files. We hope to find a more elegant way to handle this in the near future.
    Duncan Temple Lang <duncan@wald.ucdavis.edu>
    Last modified: Sat Oct 6 08:15:19 EDT 2001