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

[Kevin Coombes]

On 4/20/2013 1:21 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 13-04-20 2:02 PM, Kevin Coombes wrote:
>> On 4/20/2013 12:54 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>> 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

To most Windows users, the "Rtools install"  would seem to refer to 
getting the bundled Rtools30.exe from the CRAN web site, double-clicking 
on it, selecting the options form the GUI windows that appear, and 
clicking "install".  There is no option in this procedure to change the 
names of find or sort.

As far as I can tell, the steps you are recommending take place in an 
earlier build step.  This would require the user who wants to do this to 
rebuild Rtools in its entirety, which is more trouble than it is likely 
to be worth. Especially when you can avoid the problem by using your own 
batch script or perl script to reset the path on those relatively rare 
occasions when you need to use Rtools.  Since buiilding Rtools for a 
Windows machine is something than CRAN does on a regular basis, why 
can't they just change the names there (and not bother the UNIX users, 
and probably not even bother the UNIX users who find themselves banished 
to the Windows wilderness).  Just call them "unixfind" and "unixsort" 
and everyone will be able to figure it out....