[Rd] building windows packages under wine/linux and cross-compiling.

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Uwe Ligges wrote:
<snipped>
> 
> I cannot imagine: Why should one want to perform difficult cross 
> compiling if you have Windows available?
> And why should I run R under wine? If I like Windows, I use Windows, if 
> I have like Linux, there is no reason to run R under wine.

*You* cannot imagine.

I am an almost exlusively linux person. An acquitance, also a
mainly linux person, for teaching purpose, asked for windows binary
of something I (co-)wrote, to be installed on to the teaching machines.
Installing too many development tools on teaching machines is not
an option; so the other option, than cross-compiling, is to
*borrow* a windows machine *set up for development purposes*.
(which I did, at the start).

I cannot, and would not, keep on repeatedly borrowing other
people's windows development machines, which they have possibly
spent some time in setting up; besides, they may not have all
the tools, and/or willing to put things like Mingw or ActiveState
Perl on their machines. I did have to install both, plus the
latest version of R - in my first native try, and immediately
de-installing them from the borrowed machine as soon as I finished.

You are not involved in any teaching roles, I reckon? And you haven't
written any packages that you would like others to use, on a
different platform from your own?

Since I am cross-compiling, it goes that I would like to test
the result of cross-compiling right-away under wine, without
switching machine or rebooting (in case of dual boot). In fact I
found and fix a bug in my code, which *only* shows up under
wine's implementation of msvcrt, not on win2k's or glibc's - wine's 
msvcrt behavior is valid ANSI C, but different from MS win2k
or linux glibc's. (and nobody can say for sure win2k's msvcrt is
exactly the same as NT, XP, etc's).

HTL