[R-SIG-Win] Rtools 4.0

[Avraham Adler]

Hello, Jereon.

I am very happy and grateful for the work you have done, unsupported, in
modernizing the Windows toolchain. What concerns me, though, is that there
seems to be a major overhaul to the build process. For most purposes it is
much neater and easier. Unfortunately, it seems to do so at the expense of
customization. You are preparing the first major change to the windows
build in over a decade, if not longer, and it breaks a number of existing
processes.

For example with the Mkrules.local options, all PATHS can be set prior to
build. I see the option to change Innosetup with ISDIR, but where is the
QPDF option? Also, you are testing for " test -f "C:/Program Files
(x86)/Inno Setup 6/ISCC.exe" in PKGBUILD
<https://github.com/r-windows/r-testing/blob/master/PKGBUILD>, not ISDIR,

More importantly, at least to me, is that since at least 2013, I've been
building Rblas against OpenBLAS. That requires changing ATLAS PATH in
Mkrules.dist and Makevars.win in R_HOME/src/extra/blas. I see no way to do
that in the current system.

Lastly, and this may be less important, to use LTO, at least under the
current system (which i do NOT advise, I spent months trying to get it to
work and the best I could do was build base+recommended) other files need
to be changed to ensure that the properly prefizxed AR, NM, and RANLIB are
used, that the proper flags are passed to both compiler and linker, and
that allow multiple definitions is set. I wouldn't have the foggiest idea
where to begin with your setup, because you aren't working from a static
package of R-XXX but seem to download it on the fly every time.

Maybe I don't understand enough of what you did, and I'm just not seeing
it. I'd be thrilled, if you could point out where I've been blind or where
I've overlooked these abilities.However, if there is going to be a major,
breaking, overhaul of the build, it would really help those of us who work
and develop in Windows to be able to continue with the customizations we've
built (and which we have, in our own small ways, supported the wider R
community).

Thank you very much,

Avi

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