On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 10:16 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org> wrote:

>
> On 24 August 2012 at 09:06, LIYING HUANG wrote:
> | We have several projects in the center done by researchers over years
> | in Fortran, there are copy right issues etc to prevent us from
>                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> | giving away the source codes, but a lot of social scientist are
>   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> | interested to use the program. We tried to use dlls to make plugins
> | (available in our website) in various statistics platforms
> | (SAS, STATA and R) to make it available to general public.
> |
> | We used to be able to build R package using dll on version R-2.7.0,
> | , but failed to build with newer R version with the same source.
> | Any help is greatly appreciated.
> |
> | When I try to build R package for newer version of R, I could build
> | to get "lcca_1.0.0.tar.gz", but when I "R CMD check lcca_1.0.0.tar.gz",
> | I got error message as:
> |
> | * using log directory 'D:/project/LCCA/lcca.Rcheck'
> | * using R version 2.15.1 (2012-06-22)
> | * using platform: i386-pc-mingw32 (32-bit)
> | * using session charset: ISO8859-1
> | * checking for file 'lcca/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
> | * checking extension type ... Package
> | * this is package 'lcca' version '1.0.0'
> | * checking package namespace information ... OK
> | * checking package dependencies ... OK
> | * checking if this is a source package ... OK
> | * checking if there is a namespace ... OK
> | * checking for executable files ... WARNING
> | Found the following executable file(s):
> |   libs/lcca.dll
> | Source packages should not contain undeclared executable files.
> | See section 'Package structure' in the 'Writing R Extensions' manual.
> | * checking whether package 'lcca' can be installed ... ERROR
>
> This tells you that in order to have a proper package, you need to include
> the very source code you want to hide.
>
> This is a CRAN Policy decision enforced by current R versions (but not the
> rather old version you compared against), and there is now way around it.
> You could try to construct "defunct" packages lacking the DLLs and instruct
> the users to get them from somewhere else, but that is at the same rather
> error prone (as you will lack all the built-time checks you would have with
> source code, as well as a better assurrance that compatible tools are used)
> and distasteful as CRAN is about Open Source.
>
> So your best bet may be to go back to the copyright holders....
>

Dirk's comments are extremely relevant if you were hoping to host the
package on CRAN (which you basically won't be allowed to).  You can still
distribute it from your institutions homepage I think.

Kasper

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