[R-pkg-devel] Version of make on CRAN Windows build machines

[Winston Chang]

On Windows I have a package that builds just fine with any recent version
of Rtools. But on win-builder it fails because the version of GNU make on
that machine does not support if-else syntax. Support for this syntax was
added in GNU make 3.81, which was released in 2006. The version of Rtools
on my computer comes with GNU Make 4.2.1.

I resubmitted the package to win-builder with `make --version` and found
that it is using version 3.79.1. I'm curious -- why does it use such an old
version of make, and one that does not come with Rtools? I've tried to
follow the documentation at
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html#The-Windows-toolset to
get a build environment as close as possible to what is prescribed. But
since this environment differs from what CRAN actually uses, it makes for a
long and error-prone process when submitting a package to CRAN.

-Winston

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