On Tue, 10 Nov 2009, Paul Gilbert wrote:
I am just trying to adjust one of my packages so the C code builds in
Windows. This is code that has been around for a long time, and I'm am only
a casual reader of C, so it has had the "if it is not broken don't touch it"
approach for many years. The section 1.2.1 "Using Makevars" of "Writing R
extensions" starts:
"Sometimes writing your own configure script can be avoided by supplying a
file Makevars: also one of the most common uses of a configure script is to
make Makevars from Makevars.in." ...
I am still a bit confused about whether packages src/ should have, in
addition to Makevars.win, a file Makevars or a file Makevars.in. The rest of
the section seems to imply that the file should be Makevars, but the first
four examples I pulled of CRAN all have Makevars.in. My confusion is about
whether R scripts will automatically turn Makevars.in into Makevars or would
I need my own configure script to do this (and I am hoping not to need a
configure script).
Which is preferred? (And could the first paragraph of the section be made
more explicit?)
I think you need to read the earlier mentions of Makevars in that
manual: your confusion seems to be that you have jumped in to a later
section. The only use of src/Makevars.in is that it is a conventional
name for a template file for configure to turn into src/Makevars. As
the manual says
The default rules can be tweaked by setting macros in a file
@file{src/Makevars} ... There are platform-specific file names on
Windows: @file{src/Makevars.win} takes precedence over
@file{src/Makevars}.
So to tweak the make rules you need src/Makevars: if you need a
platform-specific version you need src/Makevars and src/Makevars.win.
You may choose to use configure (or configure.win) to make these, but
you do not need to (and packages using e.g. LAPACK or BLAS do not do
so).
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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