[R] The steps of building library in R 2.1.1

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 22 Jul 2005 00:01:18 +0200, Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> wrote:
> Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> writes:
> 
> > On 7/21/2005 9:43 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > > I think you have been using R too long.  Something like
> > > this is very much needed.  There are two problems:
> > >
> > > 1. the process itself is too complex (need to get rid of perl,
> > >     integrate package development tools with package installation
> > >    procedure [it should be as easy as downloading a package],
> > >    remove necessity to set or modify any environment variables
> > >     including the path variables).
> >
> > I agree with some of this, but I don't see much interest in fixing it.
> >
> > For example, getting rid of Perl would be a lot of work.  When the Perl
> > scripts were written, R was not capable of doing what they do.  I think
> > it is capable now, but there's still a huge amount of translation work
> > to do.  Who will do that?  Who will test that they did it right?  At the
> > end, will it actually have been worth all the trouble?  Installing Perl
> > is not all that hard.
> 
> Another point of view is that the issue is that we cannot ship a full
> set of build tools with R on Windows, the main obstacle being that
> Active Perl has redistribution restrictions.
> 

Although the ultimate answer is to get rid of perl entirely,
in the same vein as your discussion, perhaps R could simply 
provide standalone executables for each perl program currently
used by R  (using perlcc to produce them).

I believe there is a free alternative to Microsoft's Help Compiler 
too but I just googled for it and was unable to locate it.

By placing all these items (and the UNIXish tools) in the \R\rw...\bin
directory and using the registry as in Rcmd.bat and Rgui.bat
found in batchfiles:
  http://cran.r-project.org/contrib/extra/batchfiles/
modifying the path and environment variables by the user might 
be eliminated.