[Rd] Re: [R] Creating a minimal package

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:49:04 -0500, Douglas Bates
<bates at stat.wisc.edu> wrote :

>I haven't checked on the installation tools under Windows but I think 
>that most, if not all, of the creation and installation of a binary 
>package (i.e. building indices, etc.) could be done in R for packages 
>that do not require compilation of source code and provided that you are 
>willing to go without some forms of the man pages.

Yes, I think that's right.  Currently the roadblocks are:

 - Perl 

I think we could write around this.

 - Microsoft Help Compiler

Users who don't have it could do without CHM help files.

 - Lots of Cygwin (and other) tools involved in making packages.

We could possibly rewrite the build process in R, but I don't think we
should.  I think a better solution would be to distribute the toolset
with R.  The full toolset doesn't add up to much (maybe 1.5 M).  A
problem is that multiple Cygwin versions don't coexist nicely, so we'd
have to be careful during installation.

 - MinGW gcc

Users who want to compile code would still have to install the
compiler.

Duncan