[Rd] Building Packages on Windows using .Rbuildignore (PR#7379)

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:11:24 -0500, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote :

>>One I thing that would be quite useful and would even solve
>>Gabor's problem: 
>>The introduction of a new command line switch, say "--build-ignore",
>>to the commands 'R CMD check' and 'R CMD install'
>
>Shouldn't that option be "--ignore-build-ignore"? :-)
>
>More seriously:  I suspect that an on/off switch for the .Rbuildignore
>file wouldn't be sufficiently flexible: the same package author might
>want different things at different times, e.g. building a binary for
>Windows would include different files than a binary for another
>platform.  We could put together some sort of system of conditionals
>within the .Rbuildignore file, but I think it would be better to just
>advise such package writers to maintain one or more .Rbuildignore.in
>files, and manually (or by makefile) copy the appropriate one in place
>first.

A problem with my suggestion:  on CRAN, package authors don't build
Windows binary packages, Uwe does.  This means that the decision
needs to be there in the source or it won't affect the build.  What we
do in other cases (e.g. makefiles) is have a *.win version of the file
that only applies to Windows.  Should .Rbuildignore be handled
similarly?

Duncan Murdoch