[R] Building R packages under Windows.

[Uwe Ligges]

Duncan Golicher wrote:

> 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.

The docs are already very condensed for this topic and you need to read 
each line (sometimes each word!). Do you want more text to read through 
that contains the same information?

Telling us what your problem is would be much better. I do not know what 
is missing in the docs - it's just working for me.

Uwe Ligges


> Thanks,
> 
> Duncan Golicher
>