[R-pkg-devel] Unable to load Windows NETIO.SYS and WINSPOOL.DRV DLLs

[David Sterratt]

On Mon, 2023-02-13 at 19:08 +0100, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
> For reference, there is an old patch for RGtk2 package that I had
> created when working on Rtools42, though I am not very optimistic it
> will help in this case:
>
> https://svn.r-project.org/R-dev-web/trunk/WindowsBuilds/winutf8/ucrt3/r_packages/old_patches/CRAN/RGtk2.diff

Many thanks. I've not tried this patch yet, but it looks like it's not
made the development version of RGtk2, which is what I had been working
with. I will try out the archived RGtk2_2.20.36.3.tar.gz

> I've added gtk2 libraries to Rtools42 as they were needed by a CRAN
> package (RGtk2) at that time and available in MXE. Now MXE has gtk3,
> but
> not gtk4.
>
> If there is a need for gtk4 in a CRAN package, the best way forward
> would be to contribute gtk4 build configuration to MXE, ideally also
> after testing it builds as part of Rtools43 (which is a subset of MXE
> but with some updates not yet upstream). We could then replace gtk2
> by
> gtk4 in Rtools. CRAN servers will then get gtk4 simply via updating
> Rtools.
>
> This is only what would be needed for Windows. For macOS, gtk4 would
> have to be added to the recipes. For Linux, the package should work
> with
> gtk4 distributions available in main distributions.

This is helpful to know, as it suggests that if RGtk2 could be updated
to work with Gtk4, installed into MXE, and if the Mac recipies could be
updated, the changes RTools might be accepted, and then RGtk2 (perhaps
renamed RGtk4) might be uploadable to CRAN.

From this message, and Uwe's it's clear that the long-term future of
RGtk2 depends on an update to Gtk4, and I've asked the maintainer about
what the prospects of that might be:
https://github.com/lawremi/RGtk2/issues/12

Best wishes,

David
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