Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
Other resources are: - http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/
My plan is that this is only going to include updates of the information in the R Admin manual, e.g. when a new version of one of the tools is available, this page will give advice on whether to use it or not.
- README.packages in \Program Files\R\rw2001 or whatever version of R
As mentioned, all of this has moved into the admin manual.
- posts by me, John Fox, Andy Liao in r-help or r-devel
I use Windows XP and it also took me quite a bit of time until I figured it out too. I was really wondering as I got frustrated how
it was possible that 500+ packages got developed for R when it
was so hard to figure out how to create a package, particularly
if you want to put in a vignette. One of the problems is that its
dependent on so many other pieces of software and also there can
be path problems that you have to figure out. I suspect that the process
is somewhat smoother under UNIX and maybe most people use
that.
Fortunately, it does all work once you get it figured out
and its worth it if you are going to do a lot of development since
it really helps organize you. If you are just going to use it briefly
or casually its probably not worth the hassle. Once you do figure
it out it does work although there are a few annoyances.
R CMD CHECK is really great although I wish there were some way of telling it to ignore the files referenced in .Rbuildignore so one does not have to do a build first. Also the error messages
from the process are often less than helpful but I suspect it would
be difficult to improve since it can go wrong at a point which is
different than the source of the problem.
I think the fixable problems are: - a guide is needed, as you mention
Comments on the new organization are welcome. They'll be unlikely to make it into 2.1.0, but 2.1.1 or 2.2.0 will benefit from them.
- the prerequisites need to be reduced:
-- significant portions are written in perl which is probably a holdover from the days when R was less powerful and now
could all be ported to R
This would be nice, but, as you say, there's a significant amount of work there. It seems to me that giving instructions on how to install Perl is a lot easier, and the work a user does in installing Perl is small compared to all the other things someone writing a package would be doing, and only needs to be done once. So I have no intention of redoing this, and wouldn't even be all that enthusiastic about testing a submission of rewrites from someone else.
-- it would be nice it the tools were not needed either.
I don't think this is likely any time soon. The tools are there to provide "make" and a Unix-like environment in which to run it. I don't think it's likely anyone would rewrite make in R. Some of the other tools could be replaced with R code, but since you're installing one, why not install several?
-- reduced functionality with no Microsoft style help should be
possible to optionally allow one to create packages without
downloading the Microsoft help compiler
This is possible, by editing the MkRules file and/or using the --docs=normal
option to BUILD or INSTALL. I've just fixed up the R-admin description a bit to make this clearer.
- the TEXINPUTS problems with MiKTeX needs to be solved
by MiKTeX (they know about it and intend to solve it but I am
not sure how quickly that will happen. In the meantime there
are workarounds at:
http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/miktex.html
The fourth alternative is the easiest. I think this only affects
you if you are building vignettes.)
I'm no longer sure they intend to fix it. Since I wrote those instructions, they came out with a new release that breaks one of the workarounds.
Duncan Murdoch
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