Duncan Golicher wrote:
Hello,
My question is the following. Has anyone put together an "idiots" checklist of the steps needed to build a (small personal) package under Windows, or documented their own experiences of building packages under Windows?
I ask this as last week there were some very interesting comments regarding the advantages of putting personally written functions together as a package rather than sourcing them in at the start of a session using .Rprofile. They inspired me to try to build my own package for a few functions I use in teaching on my laptop running Windows XP . I read and reread "Writing R extensions" I installed Pearl and tried build on a modified package.skeleton. I fairly quickly worked out I needed to do things like setting Tmpdir as an environment variable, but then I got stuck and frustrated and gave up. I'm sure that with more time I would get things working, but I don't have more time. Could the process be made smoother through better documentation? This may sound like laziness, but I do guess that there are others are in the same position who find that the initiial hassles of building a package (under Windows) leads to a negative cost benefit balance over less elegant solutions.
In versions up to 2.0.1, the description is a little spread out, but the main file you want to look at is readme.packages. I have tried to collect
all the information into one place in the 2.1.0 release (and put it in the R Admin manual). As far as I recall there are no important differences between the instructions, so if you download the beta version of that manual and try those instructions, I would be very happy to hear from you about anything that is unclear or incorrect. You can get the Windows beta build from <http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rdevel.html>. I do not think the beta manuals are online anywhere separate from the full release.
Duncan Murdoch
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