[Rd] Development environment for R extentions on Windows

[Jeffrey Horner]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>  On 08/09/2010 1:21 PM, Jeffrey Horner wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm setting up a development environment on Windows as the subject
>> implies. I've downloaded and installed Rtools211.exe (will upgrade
>> later when necessary) and I've also downloaded and installed mingw
>> with the help of mingw-get.exe.
>>
>> I come from a UNIX development background, so I'm at the bash shell
>> prompt for just about every step in R extenstion development. Question
>> is what is an appropriate environment for Windows development. What
>> shell do you use? Do you use cmd.exe with the PATH variable set up by
>> Rtools? Do you use the sh.exe that comes with Rtools? I've found the
>> bash shell from MinGW to be a pretty close equivalent to bash on UNIX.
>> Do you use something else?
>>
>
> I've used the bash shell in Cygwin for quite a few years, but I've been
> planning a switch to MSYS sometime.  Cygwin seems to have made some bad
> decisions lately that make it harder and harder to work with.

This is great news! I don't know how I could survive without bash's vi
style editing and command completion...

Here's my PATH variable which sets the Rtools paths first, then MinGW:

hornerj at hornerj-win ~
$ echo $PATH
/c/Rtools/bin:/c/Rtools/perl/bin:/c/Rtools/MinGW/bin:/c/localbin:/mingw/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/lo
cal/bin:/c/Program Files (x86)/R/R-2.11.1/bin:/c/Program Files
(x86)/CollabNet/Subversion Client:
/c/Windows/system32:/c/Windows:/c/Windows/System32/Wbem:/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.
0/:/c/Program Files (x86)/MiKTeX 2.8/miktex/bin

I'm going to follow the "R Installation ..." manual to compile R on
Windows and learn a bit about the build process. From there, I intend
to "port" some open source libraries that have support for being
compiled with MS VC++ over to MinGW.

Aside from my PATH variable, are there other things about my
development environment I should be aware of?

Jeff