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

[Vincent Goulet]

Le Mercredi 2 Août 2006 21:33, Duncan Murdoch a écrit :
> On 8/2/2006 6:05 PM, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
> > 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).
>
> What I'd recommend you do is get an old laptop with Windows installed on
> it, and install the development tools there.  There are probably several
> lying around peoples' offices in your department.  If you found bugs in
> your code because of differences between wine and Windows, you're also
> bound to find bugs in wine, and waste a lot of time trying to see what's
> wrong with your code when really there's nothing at all wrong with it.
>
> You'll also soon find people complaining that your package doesn't
> contain compiled HTML help, because there's no Linux tool to build that.
>
> Windows machines are cheap.  You don't need a new one to build a package
> or to run R.  I can't imagine there is any change to the build procedure
> that would cost less in our time than the cost to you of getting an old
> Windows box.
>
> Duncan Murdoch

I already wrote this to Hin-Tak privately but will repeat it here "for the 
record": use VMWare for Windows development on a Linux host (or the other way 
around, or any other combination for that matter). The Server version is now 
free. It's a great product. No need to reboot or to have a separate computer. 
A virtual one (or two, or...) is right there on your desktop.

HTH

-- 
  Vincent Goulet, Professeur agrégé
  École d'actuariat
  Université Laval, Québec 
  Vincent.Goulet at act.ulaval.ca   http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca