[R] Installing packages from source on WindowsXP

[Uwe Ligges]

Tyler Smith wrote:

> Ok, I uninstalled my copy of HHW (and deleted the extra file from the 
> Rtools/bin folder), and reinstalled from the murdoch-sutherland site. 
>  From what I read there I think it's the same version, and I actually 
> get a warning that I already have a newer version installed on my 
> machine (1.3.1) anyways. Just for good measure I installed it to 
> C:\HTMLHelpWorkshop, instead of the default location in Program 
> Files\HTML Help Workshop, in case the spaces in the folder names was an 
> issue. I updated the Path variable and voila, everything seems to be 
> working fine. So, whatever the actual problem was, it's gone now. Magic. 
> Thanks!!
> 
> On a related note, now that I seem to be on top of installing packages 
> from source files, is there any advantage to installing the R software 
> itself from source files? From the help files that sounds even trickier...

Yes, there some advantages, for example:
  - if you want to change something in the sources
  - if you want to link against some CPU optimized linear algebra system 
such as Goto's BLAS, etc.

But if you want to use R as is anyway (as most several users do), you 
won't have advantages from my point of view.

Uwe Ligges


> Tyler
>