[Rd] Rtools questions

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 7:51 PM, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at biostat.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 11-04-05 6:22 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello:
>>>
>>>
>>>        1.  How can I tell when the development version of Rtools has
>>> changed?
>>
>> I don't make announcements of the changes, you just need to check the web
>> site.  There are online tools that can do this for you automatically, but I
>> don't know which one to recommend.  Google suggests lots of them.
>
> I also asked myself this before and I must admit it took me a while to
> interpret the contents of the webpage.  There are multiple sections,
> e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2', 'Changes since R 2.11.1', 'Changes
> since R 2.11.0', and so on.  Then within each section there are some
> dates mentioned.  Given my current R version (say R 2.13.0 beta) and
> Rtools (Rtools213.exe), it not fully clear to me which section to look
> at, e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2'?  It might be more clear if there
> instead the sections would be 'Changes in Rtools213', 'Changes in
> Rtools212' and so on, and within each maybe list updates by
> dates/version.  More like a NEWS file.  Then it would be easier to see
> if there is an updated available or not.  Even a NEWS file only
> available as part of the installation will help decide whether the
> version you have installed differ from the one available online.
> Something like the following:
>
> == Changes in Rtools213 ==
>
> [...]
>
>
> == Changes in Rtools212 ==
>
> 2011-03-25:
> - Rtools 2.12 has been frozen.
> - We have updated all of the tools to current Cygwin versions as of
> March 25, 2011. We added the "du" utility from Cygwin. We have dropped
> Vanilla Perl. The libjpeg version has been updated to 8c, and libpng
> has been updated to 1.5.1.
>
> 2010-10-18: [v2.12.0.1892] <== Is this an Rtools version?!?
> - Prior to October 18, 2010, builds of Rtools212.exe did not correctly
> install the "extras" required to build R. Version 2.12.0.1892 or later
> should fix this.
> - We have now updated all of the tools to current Cygwin versions, and
> have updated the compilers, and included the 64 bit compilers into
> Rtools. See Prof. Ripley's page for the details.
> - Perl is rarely needed in R since R 2.12.0, so it is by default not installed.
>
> 2010-??-??:
> - The 32 bit version of R-devel (to become R 2.12.0 in fall, 2010)
> will be built with gcc 4.5.x, so Rtools212 contains a completely new
> MinGW toolchain based on gcc 4.5.0.
>
> == Changes in Rtools211 ==
>
> [...]
>
>
> Just a suggestion ...and thanks for providing Rtools!
>
> /Henrik

If a NEWS file were included in the Rtools distribution itself (and
not just on the web site) it would be helpful since its not always
clear which version you have on your system in the first place.

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