[Rd] cross tools (was Re: wine and build difference between R.2.4.0 and R 2.4.1 windows binaries?)

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Jan 2007, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
<snipped earlier discussion on wine>
>>
>> BTW, I am also cross-compiling some R packages with the cross tools 
>> provided by Prof Ripley. Presumably it means that I need to hack away
>> the bundled mingw stuff in the cross-tool and replaced them with the 
>> newer mingw libraries as well? (the whole thing with wine is so that I 
>> can cross-compile and test right away...)
> 
> My belief is that the cross-tools I package build R 2.4.x but need 
> updating for 2.5.0.
> 
> As I use x86_64 cross tools for R-devel it does not affect me, but I 
> will rebuild the tools on an i386 box in due course.

My main use of the cross-tool is to build the windows binary of a
custom R package (rather than R itself) - so that I can distribute it 
(after testing on some windows machines which are not equiped
with development tools), so it is more important that the cross
tool generates binaries which are compatible with the latest
official windows binary distribution, rather than being able to
build the latest development source as a whole.

FWIW, I use the i386 cross-tool provided on x86_64, and also
build wine as 32-bit and runs windows R that way. I am not
even sure if it is possible to dual-boot windows on opteron if
I had wanted to. (a waste, in any case...).

It might be worth building the cross tools as 32-bit on x86_64
just so that what you use is the same as what you give away :-)?

(I only routinely build 3 packages as 32-bit rather than
64-bit on x86_64 - R for memory consumption, wine because it
just isn't written for 64-bit, and ghostscript because
a lot of font-rendering issues are 32-bit/64-bit sensitive).

Hin-Tak