[Rd] [External] Re: Update on rtools4 and ucrt support

[Gabriel Becker]

Hi all,

I will preface this with the fact that I don't do work on windows and the
following is based on remembered conversations/talks/etc from a while ago
so may be either incorrect or out of date, but I recall one of the major
things Jeroen was  targeting was use of/integration with a meaningful
package manager for external library dependencies in windows from-source
package builds, and that *I think* this was a part of his (then explicitly
experimental) Rtools4 setup (?)

Is the above correct, and if so, is there also package manager
integration/usage in Tomas' official R-core UCRT toolchain? If not, could
it be (perhaps, as Duncan suggested, via collaborative effort involving
Jeroen as well)?

I admit, both windows toolchains/builds and non-latin encodings are things
I have so far stayed away from, so I can't really contribute beyond that,
other than to say, as others have, that I do think both are impressive
pieces of work and that both Jeroen and Tomas should have our thanks thanks
for this and a lot of other work they put into R and the R community.

Best,
~G

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 4:02 PM Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> wrote:

>
> As I type this, we are eight messages into this thread -- but I am not sure
> it has been made clear what the actual contentious issues are.
>
> There appear to be two toolchains, and they appear to be interoperate
> (though
> Duncan stated he had issues with an (arguably demanding) package).  Now, I
> have the opposite (hence positive) experience.  For one package I look
> after,
> a colleague took care of the (complicated in that case) 'needed to build
> the
> package' pre-requirements by ensuring we have a UCRT variant.  Jeroen then
> (unprompted) supplied a two-line/two-file PR to enable a Windows UCRT build
> (piggy-backing on the existing Windows build), and with that the 'ERROR' I
> had at CRAN reports under Tomas UCRT entry is gone. Net-net, this looks
> like
> a working setup to me which combines both toolchains without issues.
>
> And I was able to repeat this with a few more packages of mine for which
> Jeroen's winlibs factory has libraries---these now build to under Tomas's
> builder at CRAN.  So maybe this is not an either-or discussion?  So if
> there
> are issues, could we be told what they are, and could we possibly help
> Jeroen
> and Tomas to iron them out?
>
> Dirk
>
> --
> https://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org
>
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