R devel - Jul 2010 - Windows 64bit package build requires underscore hack?

Hello,

After much tinkering I managed to build packages using the 64bit version of
R with the help of hints from
http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/
and
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/Win64/W64porting.html
and
R-admin Manual.

But a hack was required, and this seems to be related to
a comment about underscores at the end of the second
reference above (but this comment is about FUTURE
changes in R starting with 2.12.x, and I'm not sure how
it applies to the current problem using 2.11.1).

If I simply follow the instructions of the first reference I
get lots of "cannot export / symbol not defined" errors because
by default the leading underscore is stripped off during the
shared library build process, specifically, all names in
tmp.def (created in share/winshlib.mk) do not contain a
leading underscore.

If I modify share/winshlib.mk so that the leading underscore
is not stripped everything works fine.

Have I missed some documentation explaining what is
going on here?

Thanks,
Dominick

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To be more precise, while the build process worked, the check did not. When
it got to the point "* checking for portable compilation flags in Makevars
..."
a number of shells popped up (to run c:\Rtools\sh.exe) and the process died.
This happens with Rcpp and cxxPack on an AMD machine running
Windows 7 (64bit), using the 64bit version of R.

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Dominick Samperi
<djsamperi@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hello,
>
> After much tinkering I managed to build packages using the 64bit version of
> R with the help of hints from
> http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/
> and
>
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/Win64/W64porting.html<http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/%7Eripley/Win64/W64porting.html>
> and
> R-admin Manual.
>
> But a hack was required, and this seems to be related to
> a comment about underscores at the end of the second
> reference above (but this comment is about FUTURE
> changes in R starting with 2.12.x, and I'm not sure how
> it applies to the current problem using 2.11.1).
>
> If I simply follow the instructions of the first reference I
> get lots of "cannot export / symbol not defined" errors because
> by default the leading underscore is stripped off during the
> shared library build process, specifically, all names in
> tmp.def (created in share/winshlib.mk) do not contain a
> leading underscore.
>
> If I modify share/winshlib.mk so that the leading underscore
> is not stripped everything works fine.
>
> Have I missed some documentation explaining what is
> going on here?
>
> Thanks,
> Dominick
>
>
>
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I had a problem like this for a while with bigmemory et. al...  the check
went through to the very end, including successfully building the man pages,
then a number of shells popped up and the process died as described here.
The build was successful.  We never did figure out exactly why, but are
fairly sure it was related to our older, overly complicated in our
configuration process.  This included (among other things which I doubt are
related) invoking R from configure.win for the purpose of discovering
particulars of the platform/environment.

Once we streamlined the configuration process (and avoided calling R from
configure.win in particular), the problem vanished.

We never had this problem with the use of _ as you report.  I'm sure we have
many such characters, though perhaps not in exactly the same context.

Jay

--------------------------------

To be more precise, while the build process worked, the check did not. When
it got to the point "* checking for portable compilation flags in Makevars
..."
a number of shells popped up (to run c:\Rtools\sh.exe) and the process died.

-- 
John W. Emerson (Jay)
Associate Professor of Statistics
Department of Statistics
Yale University
http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay <http://www.stat.yale.edu/%7Ejay>

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