[R] problem building R packages in windows xp

[Duncan Murdoch]

Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> On 24 July 2005 at 19:38, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> | It is already optional, and documented as such as Uwe points out:
> 
> Yup, that one I evidently didn't know ... maybe the help on --docs needs to
> be more explicit. Dunno. Or the section in the 'R Extensions' manual could
> mention it too as it doesn't seem to:

You were looking in the wrong place.  This is a problem in setting up on 
Windows, so you should be looking in the R-admin manual.  Quoting it:

"To skip building compiled html help, set WINHELP=NO in ‘MkRules’. In 
this case the Help Workshop will not be needed."

You can also do it on a case-by-case basis, as Uwe says, but I think 
editing MkRules makes more sense if you don't want to install HHC. 
Uwe's option is documented in ?INSTALL.

Duncan Murdoch

> edd at chibud:~/src/debian/R/R-2.1.1> grep 'docs="normal"' doc/manual/*
> edd at chibud:~/src/debian/R/R-2.1.1>
> 
> | > You can simply avoid building chm files by saying:
> | >
> | >    R CMD INSTALL --docs="normal" MyPackage
> | 
> | The reason it is on by default is that is the best option for building 
> | packages for distribution.
> 
> Hm. I find that a tad backwards as building packages for distribution is (or
> should) be done by scripts. And those are perfectly capable of picking a
> non-default value. Somehow I doubt Uwe builds the almost 600 Windows binaries
> by manual invocations ...
> 
> Regards, Dirk
>