[Rd] Rtools questions

Henrik Bengtsson hb at biostat.ucsf.edu
Wed Apr 6 20:45:31 CEST 2011 

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11-04-05 7:51 PM, Henrik Bengtsson 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'?
>
> Well, that depends on when you downloaded it.  I use the R version releases
> as bookmarks.  If you last downloaded Rtools after the release of R 2.12.2,
> then you only need to look at the last section.
>
> The problem with collecting changes into those that apply to each Rtools
> version is just that the change lists would be longer:  Rtools212 will get
> changes through several R releases.  When there are compiler changes,
> RtoolsXYZ generally comes out during the previous R version, because the
> compiler may only work with the R-devel version.  For instance, Rtools212
> was introduced between R 2.11.0 and 2.11.1 and was updated a number of times
> up to quite recently.  (It is now frozen, so if you download it now and are
> working with the R versions it supports you never need to worry about
> updates to it.)

I understand, and I suspected this was the reason too.

>
> However, if you want to reformat the page, go ahead, and send me the new
> version.  It's a hand edited HTML page so I'd be happy to incorporate
> changes that make it more readable, as long as it's still easy to edit by
> hand.
>
> Gabor asked how to know which version was downloaded.  If you have the
> installer file you can tell:  right click on it, choose Properties, look at
> the Version tab.  If you didn't keep the installer, I don't know a way to
> find out, but it might be recorded in the unins000.dat file that the
> uninstaller uses.  Of course, without downloading the new one you can't find
> out its version:  so back to my original suggestion to monitor changes to
> the web page.  I'll see if there's a way to automatically include the
> revision number in the filename.

This is useful - I didn't know about this version number of InnoSetup.
 I've browsed the online InnoSetup help, but I couldn't locate what
the version parameter is called.  With it, would it be possible to use
a [Code] block having InnoSetup write the version number to a VERSION
file in the Rtools installation directory?  That would make it
possible to compare what's online and what's installed.

Another alternative for figuring out if Rtools have changed would be
to compare the timestamp of the installed Rtools directory (because
you typically install immediately after download) and the
Rtools213.exe timestamp on the web server.  This could be achieved by
moving the files to, say,
http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/download/ and enable indexing
of files in that directory.

Either way, know about the version number is certainly good enough for
me.  After installing Rtools, I can simply put the installer file in
the Rtools directory to allow me to compare to it later. (I kind of
did this before by comparing file sizes.)

Thanks

Henrik

>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>
>
>
>
>  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
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>   For the past few years, I've installed the development version
>>>>
>>>> of R tools with each new release of R.  I encountered problems with this
>>>> a few days ago, so I rolled back to Rtools212.exe.  Unfortunately, I
>>>> seem to have more problems with that version.  My latest install was
>>>> under Windows 7 Home Edition.  My previous problems were on Vista, but I
>>>> also have access to Fedora 13 Linux.
>>>
>>> I know that Windows 7 64 bit has problems with Rtools.  Brian Ripley has
>>> had
>>> some luck using the tools (the bin directory) and Cygwin DLLs from last
>>> summer, along with the current compilers.  I'm reluctant to back out the
>>> new
>>> versions, because I use Cygwin for other things (including OpenSSH) and
>>> don't want to get locked out of updates.
>>>
>>> I haven't heard of problems with other Windows 7 versions, but I haven't
>>> tried them.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>         2.  "R CMD check" ends with the following:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> * checking examples ... OK
>>>> * checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
>>>> LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
>>>> This typically indicates Rd problems.
>>>> * checking PDF version of manual without hyperrefs or index ... ERROR
>>>> Re-running with no redirection of stdout/stderr.
>>>> Hmm ... looks like a package
>>>> Error in texi2dvi("Rd2.tex", pdf = (out_ext == "pdf"), quiet = FALSE,  :
>>>>     unable to run 'pdflatex' on 'Rd2.tex'
>>>> Error in running tools::texi2dvi
>>>> You may want to clean up by 'rm -rf
>>>> C:/Users/sgraves/AppData/Local/Temp/Rtmpr6z3
>>>> r6/Rd2pdf55b96c9a'
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>         This is using Rtools213, downloaded April 4 from
>>>> "www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools" with R installed as follows:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> sessionInfo()
>>>>
>>>> R version 2.12.2 (2011-02-25)
>>>> Platform: x86_64-pc-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
>>>>
>>>> locale:
>>>> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
>>>> [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
>>>> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
>>>> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C
>>>> [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
>>>>
>>>> attached base packages:
>>>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>>>
>>>
>>> Do you have pdflatex?  It's not part of Rtools, it's part of LaTeX, as
>>> described in Rtools.txt.
>>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>
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