[R] Building R packages under Windows.

[Duncan Murdoch]

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. 


In versions up to 2.0.1, the description is a little spread out, but the 
main file you want to look at is readme.packages.  I have tried to collect
all the information into one place in the 2.1.0 release (and put it in 
the R Admin manual).  As far as I recall there are no important 
differences between the instructions, so if you download the beta 
version of that manual and try those instructions, I would be very happy 
to hear from you about anything that is unclear or incorrect.  You can 
get the Windows beta build from 
<http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rdevel.html>.  I do not 
think the beta manuals are online anywhere separate from the full release.

Duncan Murdoch