[R] binary versions of packages for Windows

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Several of you have asked about `missing' binary versions of packages
for Windows on CRAN, although there was an explanation in the ReadMe.
Two things have changed:

1) Workload.  When I first started this, there were about 20 packages.
   There are now over 100 (including those in bundles).  Further, I
   rebuilt all the packages for R-1.2.0 in December 2000, but since
   then more than half of the packages have been updated, several more
   than once.

2) Licence interpretation.  GPL is a hard taskmaster.  It became
   apparent that we had a problem according to the following
   interpretation (for NTemacs on ftp.gnu.org)

      If you want to redistribute any of the precompiled distributions
      of Emacs, be careful to check the implications of the GPL.  For
      instance, if you put the emacs-20.7-bin-i386.tar.gz file from
      this directory on an Internet site, you must arrange to
      distribute the source files of the SAME version
      (i.e. emacs-20.7-src.tar.gz).

      Making a link to our copy of the source is NOT sufficient, since
      we might upgrade to a new version while you are still
      distributing the old binaries.

   First, CRAN does not keep sources of older versions of packages,
   and second my site from which CRAN's bin/windows/contrib is
   mirrored did not either.  So once CRAN updated a source package,
   the binary version should have been removed.

To meet 2), only a few GPL-ed packages now have binary versions, mostly
those for which I am the maintainer, with sources in a sources
subdirectory.  Hopefully this can be changed at a later date.

Finally, there are now other things I want to do with my own time.  (I
am not primarily a Windows user, I have no Windows machine connected
to the Internet and I do not use R in teaching, so I have little need
for these packages (nor R) on Windows.)  All I can offer from now is
to put up binary versions of packages I actually use (which is the
service I provide for S-PLUS for Windows).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._