[R] R 1.9.1 package installation problems

[Erik T. Ray]

Hello,

I am writing as an administrator, not as an R user, so forgive me if I 
am not completely knowledgeable about R.

I have a user who is creating an R package for windows from a Linux 
environment using the crossbuild environment by Jun Yan and A.J. 
Rossini. The packages she generated worked fine until she tried to 
install in R 1.9.1 for Windows. Now when she installs with

   install.packages( "Zelig", CRAN="http://gking.harvard.edu" )

it results in two errors.

First, it claims there are some missing files. When I look in the zip 
file, the files are there, but they coexist with other files that have 
the same name differing only in case. So there is both 'help/zelig' and 
'help/Zelig', and this is causing R to think that one of them is 
missing.

Second, R says that many of the files have bad MD5 checksums. I 
generated some MD5 digests using the linux command 'openssl dgst -md5' 
and compared against the ones created by the R Crossbuild script. They 
are different. So I made a new MD5 file and stuck it in the package. 
This time, the installation resulted in just three files having bad 
checksums, and they happen to be the counterparts to the "missing" 
files. In other words, it claims that "html/zelig" is missing, and 
"html/Zelig" has a bad MD5 checksum.

So I have two problems. First, MD5 checksums are not being generated 
correctly by the cross builder. At worst, I could re-generate those, so 
it is not a big deal. More problematic, there seems to be a bug in the 
way R 1.9.1 for windows imports packages that contain files whose names 
differ only by case.

Does anyone else notice this problem, or is it a known issue? Is there 
a workaround?

Thanks.

--
Erik Ray                     Unix Systems Administrator
Harvard-MIT Data Center      Harvard University
phone: (617) 496-5097        mobile: (781) 710-1162