[Rd] Development environment for R extentions on Windows

[Jeffrey Horner]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Jeffrey Horner <jeffrey.horner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

>From the MinGW bash shell, the R build went quite smoothly. However, I
did run into trouble with temporary files. I got around it by
specifying TMPDIR like so:

$ cd R_HOME/src/gnuwin32
$ TMPDIR=. /c/Rtools/bin/make all

If I didn't set TMPDIR, it would default to /tmp and the failure would
occur within the mkR target of R_HOME/share/make/basepkg.mk. For
reasons beyond me, the shell environment that's entered within the mkR
target has no notion of a root directory. Anyone else seen this?

Jeff

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



-- 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/JeffreyHorner