Hi Sebastien,
Sebastien Durand wrote:
> Hello to all,
>
> I am a package developper and I would like to
> know what is the best way to build package
> binaries for both Windows and Mac installation of
> R, using a macbook pro?
>
> The command I am presently using to create and build my packages binaries is :
>
> "R CMD BUILD ~/foo" -> This produce foo.tar.gz
You probably mean you are using 'R CMD build' ("BUILD" in upper case doesn't
work
on my system) don't you?
I can only give a partial answer...
'R CMD build' by default is not intended to build a binary package but a source
package (yes, having called this "build" doesn't help but you will get used to
it ;-)).
As you've found out, 'R CMD build ~/foo' produces something like
foo_0.9.5.tar.gz
which is a _source_ package (source packages are always suffixed with
_X.Y.Z.tar.gz).
This command ('R CMD build') is platform independent: it will produced the same
tarball
(except maybe for the vignette, more on this below) on Unix/Linux, Windows and
Mac OS X.
But in order to use 'R CMD build' you need to have the R development tools on
your system
(compilers, make, Perl, etc...). Note that the exact requirements _are_
platform dependent
(they can be tricky to install on Windows).
So now you might wonder why those development tools are required if the
resulting tarball
(foo_0.9.5.tar.gz) is more or less the result of packaging the source directory
with 'tar zcf'.
Strangely, and as you might have already noticed, for some packages, it seems
that 'R CMD build'
is invoking the C, C++ or Fortran compilers! This happens when a package
contains a Sweave
vignette (.Rnw file): in order to create the PDF version of the vignette (so it
can be included
in the packaging), 'R CMD build' needs to temporarily install the package.
Hence the compilation
when the package contains native code.
Binary packages are of course platform dependent. They have the .zip suffix on
Windows and
the .tgz suffix on Mac OS X. Note that Unix/Linux users are always expected to
install a
package from source (from the source tarball) so you only need to get into the
trouble of
building binary packages if you want to make your packages available to the Mac
OS X and
Windows users that don't have the R development tools installed (those who have
them can
always install from source with R CMD INSTALL foo_0.9.5.tar.gz).
There are different methods to build them:
(1) Recommended on Windows: 'R CMD INSTALL --build foo_0.9.5.tar.gz' will
produce foo_0.9.5.zip on Windows
(2) 'R CMD INSTALL --library=LIB foo_0.9.5.tar.gz', then manually zip (on
Windows)
or tar the LIB/foo directory. When you use this method, it is your
responsability
to properly name the resulting file.
(3) R CMD build --binary ~/foo
See
o R CMD build --help
o R CMD INSTALL --help
o "Checking and building packages" in the "Writing R Extensions" manual
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html#Checking-and-building-packages
for more information.
Also, it's a good practice to always 'R CMD check' (see R CMD check --help)
your packages
before building and distributing the binary versions.
Hopefully someone on this list will be able to tell you what's the recommended
way to build
binary packages on Mac OS X (they use some modify version of (2) AFAIK).
Cheers,
H.
> which cannot be used in a windows installation of
> R.
>
> I would be very pleased if you could enligthen me
>
> Sebastien
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