(My apologies for cross-posting to those reading also the R-devel
mailing list)
Please note an update concerning the support of UTF-8 as native encoding
on Windows, which may at this point be of interest particularly to
developers of packages with native code and to R users using R-devel
(the development version of R) on Windows:
https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/2021/12/07/upcoming-changes-in-r-4.2-on-windows/
The key part is that CRAN will switch the incoming checks of R packages
on Windows to a new toolchain targeting UCRT on Monday, December 13.
It may take up to several days for all systems to synchronize and during
this time, it may be difficult to build R-devel on Windows from source
or to install packages. After the switch, the snapshot R-devel builds
and binary package builds provided by CRAN will be built using the new
toolchain for UCRT. These new builds will use UTF-8 as the native
encoding on recent Windows.
These builds will be incompatible with the previous builds for MSVCRT
and installed/binary packages will be incompatible as well. The
recommended/simplest course of action for R-devel users is to uninstall
the old build of R-devel, RTools, delete the old package libraries, and
then install the new versions.
Checks of CRAN packages with the new toolchain have been running since
March with results available on CRAN pages. By now, most packages are
working, but some packages using native (C, C++, Fortran) code still
have to be updated. The Winbuilder service and R-hub support the new
toolchain, there is also support/example for using github actions. The
builds of R-devel and CRAN (and recommended binary packages) with the
new toolchain are available regularly since March.
I've created patches for CRAN (and required Bioconductor packages) which
are installed automatically at package installation time by R. This
feature will be also in R-devel after the switch and will be used
temporarily to give package authors more time to fix their packages. Uwe
Ligges, other CRAN team members and I have also been in touch with some
package authors, providing advice how to fix their packages, when the
issues required more explanation. I am prepared to help the remaining
authors as well if needed.
Please see the blog post and materials linked from there for more
details and feel free to ask questions.
Thanks
Tomas
______________________________________________
R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
