[Rd] R 3.0, Rtools3.0,l Windows7 64-bit, and permission agony

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 13-04-20 2:02 PM, Kevin Coombes wrote:
>
> On 4/20/2013 12:54 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> On 13-04-20 12:30 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Duncan Murdoch
>>> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On 13-04-20 11:09 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Just curious:  how often do you use the Windows find command?
>>>>>>>> We have
>>>>>>>> put
>>>>>>>> instructions in place for people to run the install process with a
>>>>>>>> renamed
>>>>>>>> Rtools find command (which I think is the only conflict). The
>>>>>>>> issue is
>>>>>>>> that
>>>>>>>> more users who want to use the command line commands are
>>>>>>>> familiar with
>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>> Unix variant (which came first, by the way) than the Windows
>>>>>>>> one, so
>>>>>>>> renaming the Rtools one would cause trouble for more people.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Its not just find - its also sort. And really R has no business
>>>>>>> clobbering built in Windows commands. This is just wrong and really
>>>>>>> causes anyone who does any significant amount of Windows batch
>>>>>>> programming (or uses batch programs of any complexity) endless
>>>>>>> problems.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Which is presumably why Rtools doesn't modify the path by default.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Better solutions (e.g. Rstudio and devtools) temporarily set the path
>>>>>> on when you're calling R CMD *.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I am well aware of the various kludges to address this including my
>>>>> own batchfiles ( http://batchfiles.googlecode.com ) which handles this
>>>>> by temporarily changing the path as well; however, the real problem is
>>>>> that Rtools does not play nice with Windows and that needs to be
>>>>> addressed directly.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It has been.  You ignored it.
>>>>
>>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>>
>>>
>>> If some change to address this has been made that would be great but
>>> there is no mention of it on the Rtools page in the change history
>>> section (the only documented change relates to the png/tiff/jpeg
>>> libraries), there was no announcement that I saw and Rtools\bin still
>>> contains find and sort so what specifically is the change?
>>
>> It's not a change to Rtools, it's a change is to the build system in
>> R:  it allows you to rename sort or find in your own copy of Rtools,
>> and R will use whatever you specify.  You were informed of this when I
>> did it in 2007, and I've mentioned it when the topic comes up here,
>> most recently in the message quoted above.  That's a long time ago, so
>> I don't remember if you tried it then, but I've never heard a
>> complaint from anyone else that it doesn't work.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
> How do you do that?  (More explicitly, what steps would I have to take
> to redefine things like find.exe and sort.exe in Rtools so that R would
> know how to find them and use them? I can't figure that out from the
> earlier parts of these messages.)
>

Rename them to whatever you want in the Rtools install, then edit the 
definitions.  I think currently they are in src/gnuwin32/Makefile and 
src/gnuwin32/MkRules (one in each), but I'd suggest you just search 
files named M* for the strings "sort" and "find", in case I've got it 
wrong, or it has changed since the last time I looked.

If you try to build R itself rather than just packages, you may need to 
do more edits, because some of the makefiles for things like the jpeg 
libraries weren't written by us, and may have these commands hard-coded.

Duncan Murdoch