[Rd] Rcmd SHLIB error

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 19 Dec 2010, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On 19/12/2010 6:06 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 8:23 PM, Dominick Samperi<djsamperi at gmail.com> 
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Gabor Grothendieck
>>> <ggrothendieck at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> I am getting this error message when I try to run Rcmd SHLIB myprog.c.
>>>>   There appears to be a missing / between etc and i386 in the path.  I
>>>> am on Windows Vista and am using R version 2.12.1 Patched (2010-12-16
>>>> r53864) and just downloaded Rtools 2.12 today.   Is this a bug in R?
>>>> How can I resolve this?
>>> 
>>> This is due to new behavior in CYGWIN (the basis for Rtools). The
>>> new CYGWIN does not like non-standard paths that have C: in them.
>>> Some CYGWIN programs will not work when fed file names using
>>> this syntax, but normally this is just a warning. The warning can be
>>> suppressed by using the Control Panel to set CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning.
>>> Another solution is to use POSIX equivalent paths of the form
>>> /cydrive/c/PROG..., but this would require more extensive changes
>>> to build scripts, etc.
>>> 
>>> There is another change that causes Rtools tar to choke in some
>>> circumstances under Windows because it tries to change ownership
>>> of the files extracted when it shouldn't. These error
>>> messags can be suppressed by using the Control Panel to set
>>> TAR_OPTIONS=--no-same-owner.

All of which is in the manual (including what the circumstances are).

>> I am still wondering what to do about this?  I have created a
>> directory called C:\PROGRA~1\R\R-212~1.X\etci386 and have copied
>> Makeconf into it.  That lets me use Rcmd SHLIB but its quite an ugly
>> workaround and there must be some better resolution than that.  Also I
>> am wondering if this same problem will crop up elsewhere.
>> 
>
> You could try running within Cygwin, as I do, on the theory that what works 
> for me might work for you.  I do use the "nodosfilewarning" setting as 
> Dominick mentioned.
>
> However, I will say that my Windows build system is much less reliable than 
> it used to be.  I don't know the cause:  I started 64 bit builds on Windows 7 
> at around the same time as I upgraded Cygwin, so it could be any of those 
> causes.  I'm tending to believe it's a Cygwin problem or a Cygwin-Win7 
> incompatibility, but I haven't had time to work out a reliable system. 
> (Symptoms I see are that very few overnight builds are succeeding; almost all 
> the ones you see on CRAN/bin/windows/base have required manual restarts after 
> they've failed partway through.)
>
> Unfortunately, I am not going to have the time to diagnose or fix this in the 
> next couple of months.  If you have spare time, you might want to try older 
> versions of the Rtools (perhaps mixing new compilers with old Rtools/bin and 
> Cygwin DLLs).

It seems to be the updated Cygwin in Rtools: working in 64-bit Win7 is 
very reliable for me (by the standards of Windows) using the 
pre-October version: the October update fails more often than not when 
building R from scratch (e.g. sh or make hangs).  People using 32-bit 
XP seem to have more success with the latest version.

-- 
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