[BioC] Rgraphviz windows version incompatible with current Graphviz

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Kasper Daniel Hansen
<kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree, it would be ideal if the Bioconductor webpages mirror README
> and INSTALL files from the top of the package.  But it also needs to
> be implemented ....  And you could argue who reads the webpage (for
> example, you seem to have missed the comment about reading the README
> file which already exists on the webpage).
>
> Now, I am not trying to be evasive about this.  There is no doubt that
> Rgraphviz is one of the more hard-to-install packages in Bioconductor,
> especially for Windows.  And we would certainly prefer the
> installation to be much more seamless.  For example, we don't
> particular like that we are requiring an old version of Graphviz, but
> we have had problems with newer versions of GRaphviz on _some_
> versions of Windows (for example, I think "we" can get Graphviz 2.26
> to work under certain variants of 64 bit Windows, but it fails under
> other variants).  In short, this package is really not trivial to get
> to work on all platforms.
>
> Now, I have been playing with the idea to experiment with bundling the
> source code of Graphviz with Rgraphviz.  If one could get it to work
> (which is a big if, since GRaphviz is really meant to be build by
> Visual Studio), it would simplify the installation process greatly
> (and it would also solve the 64bit R on WIndows problem that may be
> getting hard to ignore).  However, it is pretty non-trivial and would
> probably require as much as week or more of fulltime work for me
> (partly because of needing to use Windows) , something that I find
> hard to justify (especially since I am not really using Rgraphviz and
> certainly not Windows, myself).

Hmm, I did look again at graphviz.org and they now provide mingw
building instructions, indicating that they support mingw building
(unlike in the past).  This suddenly makes this idea much more doable.

Kasper

> Of course, volunteers are always welcome.
>
> Kasper
>
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Richard Gill <gill1109 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear Martin
>>
>> Thanks for your advice! This brings me a lot further.
>>
>> But shouldn't some of this info be contained on the 'front page" of
>> Rgraphviz at bioconductor? If you install a windows binary you don't
>> get to see a README file from the source package, and shouldn't have
>> to expect, I think, that really crucial information is hidden there.
>>
>> Yours
>> Richard
>>
>>
>>> The README file (see
>>> http://bioconductor.org/help/bioc-views/release/bioc/html/Rgraphviz.html for
>>> location, in the .tar.gz archive) says, correctly, that:
>>>
>>> o. install Graphviz ***2.20.3.1*** Windows ***binary*** distribution from
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.graphviz.org/pub/graphviz/stable/windows/graphviz-2.20.3.1.msi
>>>
>>
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>