[Rd] R-Forge SVN repositories: R CMD build/check error on Windows machines

[Stefan Theussl]

Dear R-devel,

One of our R-Forge developers pointed out that it is not possible to 
build packages under Windows using the R-Forge repository structure: a 
package resides in ./pkg - not in a directory with the same name as the 
package name.

Under Linux 'R CMD build pkg' or 'R CMD check pkg' work pretty well (I 
think Kurt Hornik fixed that in R 2.5.1 or so) whereas under Windows one 
gets the following error (this is the example sent by the user):

c:\work\packages\spdep>R CMD check pkg
* checking for working pdflatex ... OK
* using log directory 'C:/work/packages/spdep/pkg.Rcheck'
* using R version 2.7.0 (2008-04-22)
* using session charset: ISO8859-1
* checking for file 'pkg/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
* this is package 'spdep' version '0.4-21'
* package encoding: latin1
* checking package name space information ... OK
* checking package dependencies ... OK
* checking if this is a source package ... WARNING
Subdirectory 'pkg/src' contains object files.
* checking whether package 'spdep' can be installed ... ERROR
Installation failed.
See 'C:/work/packages/spdep/pkg.Rcheck/00install.out' for details.

which is:

installing R.css in C:/work/packages/spdep/pkg.Rcheck


---------- Making package pkg ------------
  adding build stamp to DESCRIPTION
  installing NAMESPACE file and metadata
  making DLL ...
  ... DLL made
  installing DLL
  installing R files
  installing inst files
  installing data files
  preparing package pkg for lazy loading
Loading required package: tripack
Loading required package: sp
...
Error in findpack(package, lib.loc) : *there is no package called 'pkg'*
Calls: <Anonymous> -> findpack
Execution halted
make[2]: *** [lazyload] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make: *** [pkg-pkg] Error 2
*** Installation of pkg failed ***

I could verify this on our 'Windows package building machine' not only 
for this package but also for others.
Therefore, it seems to me that the (Windows) R CMD build/check scripts 
are not considering the package name in the DESCRIPTION file but rather 
take the directory name as package name.

Or are we just doing something completely wrong?

I used R-patched 2.7.0 on R-Forge to reproduce this error.

Best regards,
Stefan