[Rd] how to include a windows dll in a package

[Gabor Csardi]

Thank you for the answer.

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 02:09:59PM +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Aug 2006, Gabor Csardi wrote:
[...]
> > what is the correct way to include a dll in a source package, that
> > is expected to be installed in the libs directory?
> 
> You could put it in inst/libs.   But we discourage that.
> (And if you do do this, watch out for licence conditions.)

Why is this discouraged? Not that i like putting binary files into packages,
i understand that this is against good taste. But is there a more serious
reason?

libxml2 is GPL, my package is GPL, R is GPL, so this part should be fine.

> > Or in general is there a better way than supplying the dll to use a
> > third-party library (libxml2) in a package which should build on windows as
> > well? 
> 
> As I understand it, several package maintainers have set up arrangements 
> with Uwe Ligges to do this, based on DLLs they have supplied him.  
> Package XML being an example, so I suspect Uwe already knows all about 
> libxml2.  You could actually avoid this by depending on XML and arranging 
> to have XML/libs in the PATH at load time.

I don't really like depending on the XML package, since i don't actually use
the functions provided by this package, i only want to use libxml2, which is
not even part of the XML source package.

Gabor

> -- 
> 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

-- 
Csardi Gabor <csardi at rmki.kfki.hu>    MTA RMKI, ELTE TTK