Mick,
Questions about packaging are better suited for R-devel (so I'm redirecting
there).
My understanding is that R CMD build mypkg, w/o other flags, does a bit more
than tar/gzip: it skips junk files (e.g., .o, .a, .so, etc.). Also, the
--force flag will update the INDEX file.
On Windows, you'll probably want R CMD build --binary mypkg for building
binary package. What this does is install the package in a temporary
location, then zip that installed package. The installation step is
necessary, at least because the help files need to be generated from the Rd
files.
HTH,
Andy
> From: michael watson (IAH-C)
>
> Hi
>
> OK, final stretch now, thank you to everyone who has helped!
>
> (hopefully) final question - what does R CMD build actually do that
> tar/gzip and WinZip do not?
>
> I have successfully used R CMD build to create a .tar.gz version of my
> package, which installs well and works under Linux - hurray!
> I naively
> thought that all I had to do now was create a .zip version (using
> something like WinZip) and it would work on Windows too - wrong!
>
> On Windows I get:
>
> Error in file(file, "r") : unable to open connection
> In addition: Warning messages:
> 1: error -1 in extracting from zip file
> 2: cannot open file `coXpress/DESCRIPTION'
>
> I didn't run R CMD build on Windows because I don't have
"suitable
> versions of Unix tools including make, sh, rm, sed,
> awk,mkdir, echo, cp
> and cat; we have packaged a set at
> http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/tools.zip.". Do I
> really have
> to install all of these on my Windows machine to build a package?
>
> Asked another way - I have a linux .tar.gz file which works, how do I
> make a windows version?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Mick
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide!
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>
>
