[BioC] Rgraphviz windows version incompatible with current Graphviz

[Kasper Daniel Hansen]

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).

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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