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

[Janusz Kawczak]

And it seems that this vicious circle continues forever. Before
posting these kind of messages can you please read the INSTRUCTIONS.
fBasics_190.10051.zip is a COMPILED version of the package, not
a source as you claim to be!

It works with no problems; well, at least under Linux.

Janusz.

"Richard A. O'Keefe" wrote:

> 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?
>
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