[R] installing R packages in Windows?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 22 Nov 1998, Guido Masarotto wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 21, 1998 at 11:54:09PM +0100, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:
> > Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> > 
> > > All of this is very experimental, so do be careful not to trust the
> > > results.  As gunwin32 R has no batch mode, I cannot check standard
> >             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > > scripts easily and have only run cursory checks.
> > 
> > How difficult would it be to create one? I suspect that all you need
> > is to avoid starting up the console and do stdio instead. The ESS
> > (Emacs Speaks Statistics) crowd will want this as well.
> 
>   I am not really a MsWindows programmer so I will try to summarize
>   what I know hoping that others (Luke?) will suggest the right direction.

I am much, much less of an MS windows programmer than Guido.  What I
intended to try to do was: 

(i) build almost all of R as a DLL. I think that is easy given what
Guido has done, and then other DLLs can link against the import library
for that DLL.  We just need a DLL version of R.a and a different libR.a
(I think).

(ii) build two front-ends called say Rconsole.exe and Rbatch.exe to drive
that DLL.

If it helps, S-PLUS 4.5 has essentially both Guido's options 1) (sqpe.exe)
and 2) (Splus /BATCH) and I use 1) almost all the time.

>   There are two possibilities easy to implement but not completly
>   satisfactory:
>   1) to build a only `stdio`  executable, i.e., to have an executable
>      which behaves as when you start the Unix one with the 

Yes, please, and I think that would suffice for ESS if we are careful
about prompts and stdout/stderr.  I don't care if the x11() device is not
active in this mode.  An ESS insider should be able to advise exactly what
is required; the problem with sqpe.exe is that the prompts disappear
if input is redirected.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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