[Rd] having trouble building r-devel

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 Mark.Bravington at csiro.au wrote:

> Aha-- thanks!
> 
> >> Or I've
> >> gotten my wires crossed...
> >
> >The latter.  Try commenting out
> >
> ># path (possibly full path) to same version of R on the host system
> ># R_EXE=R
> >^^
> >
> >in MkRules.  It's uncommented there from experiments with 
> >cross-compiling.
> >Works for me.
> 
> Yes, it's just worked for me too. Is it worth mentioning this in the
> INSTALL file after the sentence that says "IMPORTANT: edit MkRules to
> set the appropriate paths..."? [It may be that all my builds hitherto
> have actually invoked an earlier version of R than the one being built,
> but that this never mattered before.]

It's new in R-devel (part of the attempt to make cross-building more
maintainable).  It's a mistake in the archive and it will be commented out
come the final release barring snafus.

> >> So it looks like either (i) the documentation should be 
> >changed to tell
> >> the user to reset the path manually (and NB the dot isn't useful for
> >> Windows 2000), 
> >
> >It was when I ran Windows 2000.  What's wrong for you?
> 
> Just that, at the moment of running "make", the dot refers to
> src\gnuwin32, which doesn't pick up the R.exe file. With the
> commenting-out above, "make" now works fine for me now whether or not
> PATH starts with a dot. [I thought MS-DOS implicitly put a dot in, i.e.
> doesn't it always look for EXEs and BATs in the current directory
> first?] I think I need to start the path with <<current-R-version>>\bin
> rather than dot.

The shell is not often `MS-DOS' (command.com): e.g. I use tcsh, DJM uses
bash and Windows Xp uses cmd.exe.  The first two do not look in the
current directory by default, and so do need `.' in the path to find e.g. 
Rpwd.exe.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595