[R] Installing on Windows packages build on Unix

[Peter Dalgaard]

Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> writes:

> "Harolddd" <baize at 3dculture.com> writes:
> > > Giovanni Petris wrote:
...
> > >> 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". 
> 
> Ack! No!
> 
> Windows packages are *binary* packages, Unix's are *source* packages.

Ooops, wait a minute. We can also build binaries on Unix with "R CMD
build --binary", and they *will* be .tar.gz files. I get a rather
peculiar error message from Perl if I try, but I do get the file and
it seems that the content is equivalent to that in the zip file I
described. (Of course you can always convert .tar.gz to .zip on Unix:
just unpack with tar and repack with zip -- just be careful where you
do it or you'll end up overwriting files!)

...
> used to work, but I'm not sure it still does) is to install the
> package under Unix and then use zip to wrap up the installed files:
> 
> E.g.
> 
>   mkdir tmp
>   R CMD INSTALL mypkg -l tmp
>   cd tmp
>   zip -lr mypkg mypkg

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907