
Thanks to both of you.
 
Indeed, it was a language issue. I eventually detected a check warning stating that the DESCRIPTION file had non-ASCII characters and unknown encoding, but no special characters were in the file. 
From reading various messages on mailing lists, I added Encoding: latin1 and it worked. Then, when installing the package tarball with install.packages, the " é " in the " Propriétaire " for the library 
directory was changed to " ii ". So I used it's DOS equivalent "Program~1" and it also worked. I haven't notice any warning about using non-english Windows in the Writng R Extensions manual, but 
I may have missed it. Anyway, I realize now that using non-english Windows is probably a really bad idea in general.
 
Cheers,
Francois Rousseu 
 
 



> From: maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch
> Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:37:30 +0200
> To: francoisrousseu@hotmail.com
> CC: r-help@r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] Building package/DESCRIPTION file not existing?
> 
> >>>>> Francois Rousseu <francoisrousseu@hotmail.com>
> >>>>> on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:10:27 -0400 writes:
> 
> > Hello useRs
> 
> > I am trying to build a package for personal use and for
> > making easier working with other people but I keep getting
> > the same error message about the DESCRIPTION file not
> > existing.
> 
> > when trying to install from a source tar.gz file:
> 
> > Error in .read_description(dfile) : file
> > 'C:/Users/Propri�taire/AppData/Local/Temp/RtmpHFMONb/R.INSTALL647a3535/mypkg/DESCRIPTION'
> > does not exist
> 
> > when trying to build a binary version:
> 
> > Error in .read_description(dfile) : file
> > 'C:/Users/Propri�taire/Documents/RETROBIRD/mypkg/DESCRIPTION'
> > does not exist
> 
> > In this last case, the DESCRIPTION file is certainly
> > there! Also, help and DESCRIPTION files are edited and my
> > path variable seems to be set correctly as I can access R
> > and tex (form miktex 2.9) from the console. I feel it
> > might be related to language issues (windows on my system
> > is in french, see sessionInfo() at bottom of message) or
> > something about temporary directories, but I really can't
> > find the problem. I've looked into the cygwin warning, but
> > it didn't seemed to be the problem, though I may be wrong.
> 
> Yes, I'm almost sure it's the "language issues".
> 
> I've recently taught a course on R Package building
> and on Windows, the user had problems because of an 'ä'
> (a-Umlaut) in one of the directories in her 'path'.
> 
> So if you work from another place than
> 'C:/Users/Propri�taire/' this may solve the main problem.
> 
> Bonnes salutations,
> Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich
> 
> > Any hints? Below is the complete sequence with errors.
> 
> > Thanks, Francois Rousseu
> 
> [.........]
 		 	   		  
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