[R-pkg-devel] Anyone Know How To Setup Wine for Windows Testing?

[Tomas Kalibera]

On 9/18/20 11:56 PM, Steve Bronder wrote:
> inline
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 9, 2020 at 3:35 AM Tomas Kalibera 
> <tomas.kalibera using gmail.com <mailto:tomas.kalibera using gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 7/16/20 7:57 PM, Steve Bronder wrote:
>     > On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 2:22 PM Neal Fultz <nfultz using gmail.com
>     <mailto:nfultz using gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >
>     >> If you don't mind multi-gig docker containers, this can be helpful:
>     >>
>     >> https://github.com/scottyhardy/docker-wine
>     >>
>     >> It doesn't work with 64 bit versions of R as far as I could
>     tell, but 32
>     >> bit did install and start correctly in a few clicks when I
>     tried last year.
>     >>
>     > Thanks! I'm hoping if I can get this all working locally I can put
>     > everything into a docker container for other folks. At this
>     point I have R
>     > up and running and it can install binary packages, but there are
>     some
>     > terrible terrible Cygwin/Rtools errors I can't figure out. In
>     particular
>     > this warning / message seems worrisome
>     >
>     > Cygwin WARNING:
>     >    Couldn't compute FAST_CWD pointer.  This typically occurs if
>     you're using
>     >    an older Cygwin version on a newer Windows.  Please update to
>     the latest
>     >    available Cygwin version from https://cygwin.com/. If the problem
>     > persists,
>     >    please see https://cygwin.com/problems.html
>     >
>     > If anyone has interest I can post a script for setting up the
>     wine instance
>     > as far as I can get atm.
>
>     Did you have any update on this? If there is a problem with MinGW-w64
>     version, you can (just for experimentation) try UCRT demo build,
>     which
>     uses a newer version of MinGW-w64 than RTools 4:
>
>
> So this worked with a patched version of wine. that fixed the above 
> error. I'm waiting for that patch to go in and for the next wine 
> release to try this again.
Thanks!
>
>
>     https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/2020/07/30/windows/utf-8-build-of-r-and-cran-packages/index.html
>     (reference at very bottom)
>
>     > On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 10:56 AM J C Nash <profjcnash using gmail.com
>     <mailto:profjcnash using gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >
>     >>> Are you sure you want to try to run R etc. under Wine?
>     >>>
>     > Do I want to? No :-). But we (Stan) want to use flto and are
>     seeing errors
>     > on windows I want to be able to debug locally.
>
>     Please note Brian Ripley has added/improved support for
>     cross-compiling
>     on Linux for Windows, so that it can be used for diagnosing LTO
>     warnings
>     (see NEWS in R-devel and src/gnuwin32/README.compilation). The
>     cross-compilers and needed cross-compiled libraries for R itself are
>     part of at least some Linux distributions (he tested on Fedora).
>
>
> Yes very exciting!
>
>
>     >>> - If you have Windows running, either directly or in a VM, you
>     can run R
>     >>> there.
>     >>>
>     > Sadly I don't have access to a windows machine. If I can't
>     figure this out
>     > then I'll probably just get a windows aws instance. But it would
>     be nice
>     > for people to have a wine setup they could test locally on.
>
>     Microsoft is giving for free time-limited VMs primarily for testing
>     Edge/MSIE, you can run them in e.g. in Virtualbox. As instructed
>     in the
>     VM, take snapshots often.
>
>
> We have a Jenkins box that we use to spinup AWS windows sessions when 
> we need to thoroughly debug now but ty for the info!
>
>
>     >> - If you have Windows and want to run R under some other OS,
>     then set up a
>     >>> VM
>     >>> e.g., Linux Mint, for that. I sometimes test R for Windows in a
>     >>> VirtualBox VM
>     >>> for Win10, but generally run in Linux Mint. I've also run R in
>     some Linux
>     >>> VMs
>     >>> to test for specific dependencies in some distros.
>     >>>
>     >>> I rather doubt R will run very well in Linux under Wine. My
>     experience
>     >>> with Wine
>     >>> is that a few apps (e.g. Irfanview) run well, but many give
>     lots of
>     >>> trouble.
>     >>>
>     > Yes I'm 80/20 on whether compilation with Rtools will totally
>     work on wine.
>     > But if I can get this all setup and put it into a docker file I
>     think it
>     > will be useful for other people as well so it's worth spending a
>     bit of
>     > time on.
>
>     Being able to test R on Wine may be useful, if you figure it out, I
>     would be interested to learn more. It is easier to obtain, may be
>     easier
>     to automate, and some low-level bugs may be easier to diagnose. Of
>     course, for the price of sometimes seeing errors not present on real
>     Windows.
>
>
> Do you think there would be more false positives or true negatives? 
> That was my one big concern since it's just emulating the actual 
> windows software environment.
An (expensive) way to try out would be to run all CRAN/BIOC checks on 
Windows and in Wine and compare the results.  Things breaking in Wine, 
but not in Windows: hopefully often it would be clear immediately from 
Wine messages in many cases that it is a Wine issue. Also it may be a 
real problem that just does not map to a failure on Windows. Things 
working in Wine, but breaking in Windows, hopefully would be uncommon.

If Wine turns up usable for this, we could legally distribute a virtual 
disk with say R-devel and free applications needed by it, with a simple 
script that would just run a package check there on any Linux 
distribution. Maybe even as a docker/singularity image. This should make 
it easy and fast for Linux users to check their packages (of course, 
this can't replace completely testing on Windows, and there is 
winbuilder and rhub, too).

That is in addition to the added flexibility of debugging the low-level 
bugs having the source code for the "OS".

Best
Tomas


>
>     Best
>     Tomas
>
>     >>> JN
>     >>>
>     >>>
>     >>> On 2020-07-15 1:17 p.m., Steve Bronder wrote:
>     >>>> Does anyone know of a setup guide for getting R and Rtools
>     4.0 up and
>     >>>> running on Wine with the Windows Server 2008 R2 VM? Do other
>     maintainers
>     >>>> with more knowhow think that would be useful for debugging
>     purposes?
>     >>>>
>     >>>> I've been trying to test out some flto gcc things for windows by
>     >>> setting up
>     >>>> a local wine VM on my ubuntu box. Wine has an option for
>     Windows Server
>     >>>> 2008 R2 (which I believe is the windows session CRAN uses?)
>     If anyone
>     >>> has
>     >>>> done this before and knows of a guide somewhere that would be
>     very
>     >>> helpful!
>     >>>> Regards,
>     >>>>
>     >>>> Steve Bronder
>     >>>>
>     >>>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>     >>>>
>     >>>> ______________________________________________
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>     >>>>
>     >>> ______________________________________________
>     >>> R-package-devel using r-project.org
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>     >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
>     >>
>     > - Steve Bronder
>     >
>     >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>     >
>     > ______________________________________________
>     > R-package-devel using r-project.org
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>
>
> - Steve Bronder



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