[Rd] Offer zip builds

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 03/06/2019 9:16 p.m., Steven Penny wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 8:04 PM Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>> I don't recall anyone asking for the zip in the 17 years after that
>> change, until now (though I haven't been paying attention lately, since
>> I retired from building the binaries a couple of years ago).
>>
>> If you think it's worthwhile to do it, then I don't think anyone would
>> object if you went ahead and did so.
> 
> If I visited this page:
> 
> https://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/bin/windows/base
> 
> and found Zip builds I would use those. Not only do those not exist, but the
> installer has been created in such a way that it cant even be extracted from.
> Just because you dont recall it, doesnt mean the demand isnt there. The R
> community isnt exactly reachable:
> 
>> NOTE: due to abuse by spammers, since 2016-07-09 only “members” (including all
>> who have previously submitted bugs) can submit new bugs on R’s Bugzilla. For
>> now, either post (e-mail) your bug report to R-devel or ask an R Core member to
>> add you manually to R’s Bugzilla members.
> 
> http://r-project.org/bugs.html
> 
> So bugs and feature requests cant even be posted to bugzilla. Then regarding the
> mailing list, even if subscribed you cant post, as all posts are moderated.
> Compare to other languages, where you just log in an post an issue:
> 
> - https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues
> - https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues
> - https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues
> - https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues
> - https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/issues
> - https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues
> 
> If R team is happy with current status quo, then do nothing. If they are
> interested in growing the userbase this might be one way to do it.
> 

You are as much a member of the R team as I am.  If you are interested 
in growing the userbase, then you should go ahead and do it.

By the way, I realized after posting that I was wrong when I said nobody 
would object if you did that.  People object to everything.

Duncan Murdoch