[Rd] Problem building (binary) packages for Windows

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sat, 16 May 2009, Martin Maechler wrote:

>>>>>> "UweL" == Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
>>>>>>     on Fri, 15 May 2009 20:48:03 +0200 writes:
>
> [.............]
>
>    >> Thank you for clarifying this and once again apologies for stirring you
>    >> up with something that had been fixed in the mean-time already.
>
>    UweL> For R-devel, it is in the svn logs. Since it may change again, NEWS is
>    UweL> not always edited while things are tested.
>
> well, and if a new feature is introduced, it gets a NEWS entry
> (hopefully), but if the new feature contains bugs, these will be
> fixed of course with*OUT* another NEWS entry.
>
> Indeed, the NEWS apply to (eventually) released versions of R,
> so fixing transient bugs is *never* documented in NEWS.
>
> ... leading us back to what Brian already said:
>  >>  'Under development' needs to be taken seriously.

This was a Windows-only issue, so the final version was reported in 
the May 1 entry in src/gnuwin32/CHANGES, not NEWS:

     o   Rcmd INSTALL --build in 2.9.0 did not make _bundles_ in the
         format install.packages() expected.

[When I looked that was missing from the RSS feed for R-devel, so 
perhaps another message is to look at the NEWS/CHANGES files 
directly.]

As far as I can see from the svn logs, the first attempt at a fix was 
on April 25 and that was changed to the more successful current 
solution on April 27 (well over two weeks ago, _pace_ claims earlier 
in the thread).

-- 
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