[R] RE:Building R packages under Windows.

[Duncan Golicher]

Hello,

I feel a brief follow up to my post a few days ago is in order. Thanks 
to Renaud Lancelot's truly excelent step by step guide I solved my own 
difficulties in building R packages for personal use. A short while 
after he sent me his document the reply was -"Voilà!  Je l'ai 
fonctionnant (enfin!). C'est facile!" My French is obviously quite 
hopeless which is a tribute to the clarity of his explanation! However I 
am still receiving a suprising number of off list comments to the effect 
that package building is much more trouble than it is worth.

I'm now convinced that it's not, thanks to Renaud's very clear document.

The problem seems to lie in the fact that the "official" documentation 
for package construction is aimed at those providing serious "R 
extensions" for publication on CRAN.

That's fine, but packages are also very useful for personal use as a 
neat way of keeping your own stuff organised and documented. At the 
moment the overhead (time) for personal package construction 
superficially looks much higher than it need be, especially for users of 
R under Windows. Dare I say it, but all the saintly souls who dedicate 
their lives to R sometimes overlook lay users who have a(nother) life!

Is anyone working on a simple way of building packages, or explaining 
how to build packages? They would find a larger user base than they 
might suspect.

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