[Rd] Building a custom Windows installer

[John Fox]

Dear r-devel list members,

It's been several years since I last built a custom Windows installer for R,
and despite my notes and the instructions in Sections 3.1.7 and D.4 of the R
Installation and Administration Manual, I've run into a problem, receiving
the following error message:

----------- snip -----------

C:\R\src\R-2.11.1\src\gnuwin32\installer>make myR IMAGEDIR=c:/temp/R-2.11.1
MDISDI=1
Makefile:3: ../MkRules: No such file or directory
make: ../fixed/rwver.pl: Command not found
make: ../fixed/rwver.pl: Command not found
make: ../fixed/rwver.pl: Command not found
make: ../fixed/rwver.pl: Command not found
make: *** No rule to make target `../MkRules'.  Stop.

----------- snip -----------

My path looks like this:

----------- snip -----------

C:\R\src\R-2.11.1\src\gnuwin32\installer>set path
Path=c:\Rtools\bin;c:\Rtools\perl\bin;c:\Rtools\MinGW\bin;C:\Program
Files\Commo
n Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Live;C:\GTK\bin;C:\Program
Files\Insightful\spl
us80\;C:\Program Files\ActiveState Komodo Edit
4\;.;c:\R\R-2.11.1\bin;C:\progra~
1\miktex~1.7\miktex\bin;c:\progra~1\htmlhe~1;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;
C:\W
indows\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\Common Files\Roxio
Shared\DLLShared\;C:\Pr
ogram Files\GnuWin32\bin;C:\Program Files\CollabNet Subversion;C:\Program
Files\
MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin;C:\Program Files\SAS\Shared
Files\Formats;C:\Program
Files\TortoiseSVN\bin;C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program
Fil
es\Smart Projects\IsoBuster;C:\Program Files\MiKTeX
2.7\miktex\bin\;C:\Program F
iles\QuickTime\QTSystem\;C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Windows
Live;C:\Program Files\SSH Communications Security\SSH Secure
Shell;C:\Program Fi
les\Bibtex2html;C:\Graphviz2.20\bin
PATHEXT=.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC

----------- snip -----------

The directory c:/temp/R-2.11.1 contains a complete customized installation
of R, while C:\R\src\R-2.11.1 contains the unpacked R sources. This is on a
Windows Vista system. I've updated Rtools to version 2.11.  I can supply
more information, but I'm not sure what's relevant. 

I don't think that I should have to place a MkRules file in the gnuwin32
directory, but I tried copying each the MkRules.dist and MkRules.rules files
there in turn to MkRules. Neither worked; I apparently got farther copying
MkRules.rules to MkRules, but eventually got another error:

----------- snip -----------

C:\R\src\R-2.11.1\src\gnuwin32\installer>make myR IMAGEDIR=c:/temp/R-2.11.1
MDISDI=1
echo "make.packages.html(.Library)" | c:/temp/R-2.11.1/bin/rterm --vanilla
--sla
ve LC_COLLATE=C
Making packages.html ... done
adding MD5 checksums
perl JRins.pl R-2.11.1 c:/temp/R-2.11.1 1 1 0 R-core
"/iscc" R.iss > myR.log
/iscc: not found
make: *** [myR] Error 127 

----------- snip -----------

Any help would be appreciated.

John

--------------------------------
John Fox
Senator William McMaster 
  Professor of Social Statistics
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
web: socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox