[R] Installing on Windows packages build on Unix

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 27 Jun 2004, Harolddd wrote:

> > Giovanni Petris wrote:
> > 
> >> I wanted to share with a colleague a few R functions that I wrote. To 
> >> this purpose, I created a small package on my machine (Unix) and  
> >> emailed it to her. Now she is having troubles installing the package  
> >> on her Windows machine. It seems that on her side, install.packages
> >> looks for a "zip" file - while I have created a "tar.gz" file. I tried
> >> to build the package with the --use-zip options but that didn't work.
> 
> Your Windows using friend can convert the "tar.gz" file to 
> "zip" using the open-source utility "7-zip". Available at 
> http://www.7-zip.org/  It doesn't conform to many Windows 
> conventions, so reading the help files will be necessary. 
> I found that it was necessary to extract a "tar.gz" file 
> twice, once to extract from "gz" and again for "tar". 

That's pointless as the .zip file is a binary distribution and the .tar.gz 
file is a source distribution.  (There are plenty of Windows tools to 
unpack .tar.gz files, including the tar in our Rtools distribution.)

This Q is answered in the rw-FAQ, Q3.1.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595