[R] Building R packages under Windows.

[Uwe Ligges]

Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> 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.

They are available from

http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/doc/manual/R-admin.html

Uwe


> Duncan Murdoch
> 
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