[Bioc-devel] rtracklayer: BigWigFIle on Windows

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

In the man page for trackLayer::BigWigFile it says "These functions do not
work on Windows".  Despite this statement, which seems to have been around
for a while, I and several of my students seems to be able to execute
something like
  import(bwFile, which = my.gr, as = "Rle")
on Windows on a BigWig file.  In my case the OS is Windows 7 run under a
virtual machine on a Mac.  In the virtual machine I don't have full
support.  For example, the code above works when bwFile is a BigWigFile
pointing to a BigWig file stored on my local hard drive, but does not work
when I query a url; in that case I get a weird error message.  However, I
have at least one student for which this does not seem to work on Windows.

I was unaware of this when I designed a quiz problem involving importing a
BigWigFile.  I am surprised that it works at all.  What is the current
state of BigWig file support on Windows? Clearly some of it works on some
systems.

Best,
Kasper

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