[Rd] Problem building (binary) packages for Windows

[Peter Ruckdeschel]

Hi,

I am having a problem building binary packages for
Windows recently.

Normally, I use the "Murdoch-Sutherland" tool set,
       http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/
just build source packages by
       R CMD build <pkgname>
and install these with
       R CMD INSTALL <pkgname>

But now, for someone without having this tool set installed,
under Win XP, with R-2.10dev (details below), I tried
building a binary version with
       R CMD build --binary <pkgname>
which used to work for me until recently (unfortunately I
cannot specify "recently" here...)

Trying to install the created .zip file with
       utils:::menuInstallLocal()

I get an error message
"
package 'distr' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
Error in unpackPkg(pkgs[i], pkgnames[i], lib) :
  malformed bundle DESCRIPTION file, no Contains field
"

Now AFAICS I have not tried to build a bundle ...

Searching the help archives, I found a posting by Uwe Ligges,
       http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.general/64574/
saying that
       R CMD INSTALL --build
was preferable to
       R CMD build --binary
--- in which respect? Would this avoid the error message?

So far I have not come across this error message, and
packages I built with
       R CMD build --binary
installed correctly with
       utils:::menuInstallLocal()

Actually, the corresponding zip-file containes
a second DESCRIPTION file in the top folder, like a
bundle, which I think is the culpit, and after
deleting this installation worked out fine.

Could you please check what caused this second
DESCRIPTION file to be generated?

Any suggestions welcome,

Best, Peter

--------------------------------------------------
platform       i386-pc-mingw32

arch           i386

os             mingw32

system         i386, mingw32

status         Under development (unstable)

major          2

minor          10.0

year           2009

month          04

day            26

svn rev        48404

language       R

version.string R version 2.10.0 Under development (unstable) (2009-04-26
r48404)