[R] Building R packages under Windows.

[Duncan Golicher]

Hello,

My question is the following. Has anyone put together an "idiots" 
checklist of the steps needed to build a (small personal) package under 
Windows, or documented their own experiences of building packages under 
Windows?

I ask this as last week there were some very interesting comments 
regarding the advantages of putting personally written functions 
together as a package rather than sourcing them in at the start of a 
session using .Rprofile. They inspired me to try to build my own package 
for a few functions I use in teaching on my laptop running Windows XP . 
I read and reread "Writing R extensions" I  installed Pearl and tried 
build on a modified package.skeleton. I fairly quickly worked out I 
needed to do things like setting Tmpdir as an environment variable, but 
then I got stuck and frustrated and gave up. I'm sure that with more 
time I would get things working, but I don't have more time. Could the 
process be made smoother through better documentation? This may sound 
like laziness, but I do guess that there are others are in the same 
position who find that the initiial hassles of building a package (under 
Windows) leads to a negative cost benefit balance over less elegant  
solutions.

Thanks,

Duncan Golicher

-- 
Dr Duncan Golicher
Ecologia y Sistematica Terrestre
Conservación de la Biodiversidad
El Colegio de la Frontera Sur
San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico
Tel. 967 1883 ext 1310
Celular 044 9671041021
dgoliche at sclc.ecosur.mx