Windows versus Unix packages in CRAN (Was Re: [R] Rmetrics)

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
	mkdir fBasics
	unzip fBasics.zip -d fBasics
	rm fBasics/src/*.o
	R CMD check fBasics
	
	and that took me about 3 minutes.

Now me, I just did

	unzip -a fBasics_190.10051.zip
	R CMD INSTALL fBasics
	rm -rf fBasics

in a naive and trusting manner.  It took me considerably longer than 3
minutes to learn that this was what I should do, and when I did learn,
I wondered "if it's this simple, why can't R CMD INSTALL do it?"

Now I discover that it isn't that simple.  The installation apparently
went smoothly.  This is R, right?  Never occurred to me that there might
be problems.

Now, B-G--R!  It turns out that core stuff is supplied as .dll files,
which of course my UltraSPARC can do nothing with.

The author of the Rmetrics code has a perfect right to provide his code
in any form he wants under any conditions he wants (subject to GPL &c).
In particular, if he wants to provide a distribution which only works under
Windows, that's perfectly OK.

**BUT** when a distribution is peculiar to one operating system, that really
should be highlighted in big bold letters:  this is a WINDOWS BINARY
version, so that people who can't use Windows .DLL files are spared a day
of trying to figure out how to unpack and of doing an installation which
reports no errors at all and of them finding that things do not work.

There is *NOTHING* on http://www.itp.phys.ethz.ch/econophysics/R/download.htm
that says "Windows only".  Click on "I accept"and the page you arrive at has
nothing in the text anywhere that says "Windows only" or "what to do if not
Windows".  (The http://.../R/bin/windows/contrib/1.9 address of the page
was, in retrospect, a big clue, sigh.)

	It would of course be nice if the developers had done
	
	R CMD check fBasics

But if you go into the Sources directory, which I suppose you must have,
for each of {fBasics,fExtremes,fOptions,fSeries} there is an
xxx-00check.log.txt, so they _did_ run R CMD check.

	and sorted out the errors, then
	R CMD build fBasics
	
Those same check logs show errors (like failure to build .dvi files).

Will it work if I download the Sources packages?