[R-sig-Geo] Building Windows binary of rgdal package to include PGeo driver for reading ESRI personal geodatabases.

[Obrien, Josh]

I am a long-time R user, currently working with a team of ArcGIS users. The GIS guys would like to be able pass me data in the form of ESRI personal geodatabases (*.mdb), but the OGR driver that reads such files (PGeo) is not included in the Windows rgdal binary. 

Roger Bivand's 2008 book (p 111) and the "README.windows" file located in rgdal's main directory both have the same advice for me. They tell me that "the R Windows binary rgdal package can be built against an FWTools binary, using VC++."

My questions are these:

1) What does it mean to "build against" an FWTools binary? I have installed FWTools on my machine, so is the only  additional requirement that I add the path to it (presumably something like "C:\Program Files\FWTools2.4.7\bin") to my Windows PATH environment variable? Do I need to give the compiler other directions to the DLLs it'll be looking to link in?

2) Do I really need to use VC++, or is there a way to do the compilation with gcc? If anyone here has done that, do you have any advice about particular flags I'll need? Otherwise, will I likely need to go buy some version of VC++?

3) Or is there some easier solution that I'm missing? Because we're packaging this up for use by others, I'd prefer not to have to do any of the conversions by hand using the FWTools binary, and the ArcGIS folks would strongly prefer not to pass me info in shapefiles, so those two are right now options of last resort.

Thank you,

Josh O'Brien