[Rd] questions as to building R from source under Windows

[Uwe Ligges]

On 01.02.2010 12:08, Peter Ruckdeschel wrote:
> Hi R-devels,
>
> yesterday, on a new computer, in order to check my installation
> of "The Windows Toolset", I tried building R from source under
> Windows (in fact under Windows 7) --- and in the end succeeded.
>
> Some minor issues though (which I think should not be Windows 7
>   issues) which might be of more general interest:
>
> (1) TMPDIR on a different drive:
> --- not sure whether this was my fault or you could do anything
> about it: On my system, I have a separate drive for temp (i.e. E:),
> and had this set in a corresponding TMPDIR environment variable.
> During the build process of R, I had difficulties with this,
> which were only resolved when I created a tmp folder on the same
> drive (i.e. C:) and set environment variable TMPDIR to this new
> folder. Is this a known issue /can you reproduce this?
> If this is a more general issue, you might want to mention this
> in R-admin / or the documentation to Rtools.


If your setup is correct according to the manuals, it may be a problem 
in one of the cygwin tools. A more detailed description to analyse it 
would be appreciated.



> (2) TCL:
> Although I set the path to TCL in MkRules, line 26 to
>     C:\Program Files\R\Tcl   , in step    make rinstaller
> I ran into problems, because the build process was assuming
> (hard-coded, it seems) the Tcl files to reside in
> ../../../Tcl (from gnuwin32 folder, which is not the above
> set path). Did I miss something? Everything worked fine
> after I had copied the /Tcl folder to ../../../Tcl ...


Citing the "R Installation and Administration" manual:
The Tcl/Tk support files are in a zip file at 
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/: unzip this in R HOME, and it will 
add directory tree ‘R_HOME/Tcl’.


> (3) JPEG
> Meanwhile the most recent version of jpeg sources is v8,
> which is what I downloaded; I succeeded in building R with
> this version after a little manual change in bitmap/Makefile .
> ->  Could you change line 10 in bitmap/Makefile so that it
> would branch not only according to whether version was v7 or
> not but rather according to whether version was larger or equal
> to v7 or not / or set up a v8 alternative?


Well tested patches for the Makefile, MkRules and documentation 
(including manuals) are welcome.



> (4) Did not work for me: build R on D:
>              --- a Vista / Windows 7 issue?
> In the end I succeeded with my build on drive C: (NTFS formatted)
> giving the current user full access privileges to the installation
> folders; before, in order to circumvent these privilege issues,
> I tried building R on a different drive (D:) which in my case is
> formatted as FAT32; somehow I got stuck with this, though;
> (my Rtools are on C:). Is this a known issue /can you reproduce this?

I build R and packages on d:/ without any problems. I do not think that 
the drive letter is the issues here. It may be some new MS security 
policy on FAT drives - or whatever. I have not used FAT formatted drives 
for serious work for at least a decade now.

Best wishes,
Uwe



> Best, Peter
>
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