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

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 11 Jan 2007, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

> 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 do still have a i686 Linux machine, and I will use that to rebuild the 
cross-tools and test them.  There are some subtle differences (e.g. in 
address formats), which is why I wanted to make sure that cross-building 
on x86_64 was also possible.  I know the i386 cross-tools do run on 
x86_64.

The version from my i686 box is now on the website.

> (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).

Then you probably don't use Java, where there seem major 64-bit issues 
(starting with the missing browser plug-in, and including very few of 
the Java-based R packages working on most combinations of JRE and OS: I 
did briefly get a JRE working on FC5).

-- 
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