[Rd] R_HOME path getting munged in inst/doc/Makefile on Windows

[Prof Brian Ripley]

This is a bug in the package: you are required to quote paths in
Makefiles, e.g. to allow for spaces in the path.

And let's knock the issue of forward and backwards slashes on the 
head: they are equivalent on Windows.  Despite your perjorative 
comments, the supplied value of R_HOME is valid.

On Mon, 21 Mar 2011, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have come across two separate packages that have a Makefile in inst/doc
> which use the R_HOME variable.
>
> In both cases, the path to R_HOME gets munged in such a way that commands
> that include R_HOME fail on Windows:
>
> For example, one Makefile, for the xmapcore package (
> https://hedgehog.fhcrc.org/bioconductor/trunk/madman/Rpacks/xmapcore/username/password:
> readonly) has this:
>
> R=${R_HOME}/bin/R
> SUITE=../cookbook/delia.R
> [...]
> ${R} --vanilla --verbose < ${SUITE}
>
> the output of trying to build this package includes:
>
> * creating vignettes ... ERROR
> E:\biocbld\BBS-2~1.8-B\R/bin/R --vanilla --verbose < ../cookbook/delia.R
> E:biocbldBBS-2~1.8-BR/bin/R: not found
> make: *** [pdf] Error 127
> Error in tools::buildVignettes(dir = ".") : running 'make' failed
> Execution halted
>
> It seems R_HOME is not getting resolved to a valid path. That's strange
> because R CMD echo shows the right thing:
>
> E:\sandbox>\biocbld\bbs-2.8-bioc\R\bin\R CMD echo %R_HOME%
> e:/biocbld/bbs-2.8-bioc/R
>
> That's a nice path with all forward slashes and no funny 8.3 paths with
> tildes.  But it looks like when R_HOME is invoked in a Makefile, the
> resulting path has a mix of forward and backslashes, and gets translated
> into 8.3 style, and the resulting path is not valid for finding R
> executables.
>
> Note that R_HOME is defined within R; I don't also have it defined at the
> shell level:
>
> E:\sandbox>echo %R_HOME%
> %R_HOME%
>
> Any ideas?
> Thanks,
> Dan
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.13.0 alpha (2011-03-18 r54865)
> Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-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
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595