[Rd] Watch out for the latest Cygwin upgrade

[dhinds at sonic.net]

Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> I just updated my copy of Cygwin to the latest version, and now Windows 
> builds are failing on that machine.  The only parts of the R toolset I 
> changed were the Cygwin dlls.  I haven't tracked down exactly what the 
> problem is, and probably won't be able to do so for a few days.

> So if you're a Windows user thinking about a Cygwin upgrade, be prepared 
> for problems...

The change that bit me is that the latest cygwin bash is unhappy with
cr/lf line endings in scripts.  Which breaks some of the "R CMD ..."
scripts in non-obvious ways.  The error messages are hard to interpret
because they have embedded "\r" characters, causing some of the text
of the messages to be overwritten.

There is a sort-of workaround in the latest release (the "igncr" shell
option) but that seems to still be in flux so I decided to revert to
the previous release for now.

There seems to be a somewhat cavalier attitude among Cygwin developers
about backwards compatibility.  They've said that their primary focus
is on making cygwin as linux-like as possible, and they're willing to
sacrifice interoperability to do so.

-- Dave