R devel - Nov 2005 - Building a windows binary of a package on Linux

Dear List,

Can I build a binary package (.zip) for Windows on my Linux machine from
my package sources? There is no C, C++, Fortran code involved, just
plain ol' R. I read through the article by Jun and Rossini, but (on
first reading) this seems more targeted at building a Windows version of
R and Windows package binaries that contain C, C++, Fortran code that
needs to be compiled.

Thanks,

Gav
-- 
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Gavin Simpson                     [T] +44 (0)20 7679 5522
ENSIS Research Fellow             [F] +44 (0)20 7679 7565
ENSIS Ltd. & ECRC                 [E] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk
UCL Department of Geography       [W] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/cv/
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On 11/30/2005 9:33 AM, Gavin Simpson wrote:
> Dear List,
> 
> Can I build a binary package (.zip) for Windows on my Linux machine from
> my package sources? There is no C, C++, Fortran code involved, just
> plain ol' R. I read through the article by Jun and Rossini, but (on
> first reading) this seems more targeted at building a Windows version of
> R and Windows package binaries that contain C, C++, Fortran code that
> needs to be compiled.
You should be able to.  Instructions are in the README.packages file in 
R_HOME/src/gnuwin32.  I don't know if you've got that file if you 
installed a pre-built R, but it's in the source tarball (and in 
https://svn.r-project.org/R.  Choose a tag subdirectory for a release 
version, or the trunk for the latest and greatest.  You'll probably get 
the same instructions on all recent ones, they don't change much.

Duncan Murdoch

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Gavin Simpson wrote:
> Can I build a binary package (.zip) for Windows on my Linux machine from
> my package sources? There is no C, C++, Fortran code involved, just
> plain ol' R.
A high proportion of the time you can just zip up the installed package on 
Linux.  We don't understand why some people have reported failures, but as 
this is not supported (and so is not tested regularly) we removed it from 
the documentation a while back.  But both Marc Schwartz and I succeeded 
a month or two ago.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 14:33 +0000, Gavin Simpson wrote:
> Dear List,
> 
> Can I build a binary package (.zip) for Windows on my Linux machine from
> my package sources? There is no C, C++, Fortran code involved, just
> plain ol' R. I read through the article by Jun and Rossini, but (on
> first reading) this seems more targeted at building a Windows version of
> R and Windows package binaries that contain C, C++, Fortran code that
> needs to be compiled.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Gav
Gavin,

If you have the source tarball, there is a file called README.packages
in .../src/gnuwin32 which describes the process. The details begin on
line 124 in that file. That too covers more than just R code based
packages.

If you just have R code only, you could use the following:

  cd R_HOME/library 
  zip -r9X mypkg mypkg

where 'mypkg' is the folder name of the _installed_ Linux version of the
package.

This creates 'mypkg.zip', which can then be installed on the Windows
side.

HTH,

Marc Schwartz