[R] Packaging under Win32 / cygwin : ZoneAlarm conflict [solved]

[Peter Ruckdeschel]

just for the record...

recently I have had quite some problems with package
building under Win XP.

After some searching I found out that it was nothing R
was to be blamed for but rather my firewall,
i.e.; ZoneAlarm.

As it seems, this problem has gone unnoticed so far ---
I only found Marc Schwartz's posting

  http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/devel/03b/0246.html

in the R-lists-archives.

In my case it was not only performance, but there seemes
to be a serious leakage phenomenon between cygwin's

   sh  (sh.exe dating from 01-27-04)

from Dunchan Murdochs' Rtools.exe
(cygpopt-0.dll from 04-13-07)

and

   ZoneAlarm (version 70_337_000)

I got reports that "fork: resource temporarily unavailable" and
finally virtually it shot off my system ...

Searching a bit further I found a more recent posting by
Luca Trevisani in the cygwin - archives:

   http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2007-02/msg00673.html

who suggests replacing ZoneAlarm by other free firewalls.

In the end I did that, i.e.; removed ZoneAlarm completely
from my system and replaced it by some other firewall
(and also informed ZoneLabs about that conflict)

... and lived happily ever after ;-)

Hopefully this information is of help to others running into
similar problems.

Best,
Peter