[Rd] Building packages on Windows fails

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Peter Kleiweg wrote:

> Duncan Murdoch schreef op de 6e dag van de wijnmaand van het jaar 2005:
>
>> On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Peter Kleiweg wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> What has changed in R for Windows from version 1.7.1 to
>>> 2.2.0 that won't allow me to build binary packages?
>>
>> Many things have changed; I don't know which is causing the failure you see.
>> One change is that instructions are now collected in the Installation and
>> Administration manual. Try following the setup instructions there and see if
>> it still fails.
>
> I can't find anything on building packages for Windows in that
> manual.

Your problems was installing, so the section on `Installing Packages' 
should help you.

A binary build is an install plus wrapping-up.

> I did find a solution to the problem. On a Linux install, each
> package has a file CONTENTS. These are missing from the Windows
> install. I copied those files from my Linux install to my
> Windows install, and then I could build my own package. So I
> guess, these CONTENTS files should be included in the Windows
> install.

And indeed they are, as the presence of 500+ packages on CRAN for
Windows will show you.

The recommended way to build a binary package on Windows is

R CMD INSTALL --build

since that is able to get HTML links made (on Windows, you need to install 
in the main library tree to do so).

>
> I got another error message when I remove a package, but I
> couldn't see what effect this error has. When I run:
>
>    d:\>Rcmd REMOVE iL04
>
> The package gets removed, but I get:
>
>    make: *** No rule to make target `indices'.  Stop.

That does seem a recent bug, soon to be fixed in R-patched.

-- 
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