Development environment for R extentions on Windows

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Duncan Murdoch

?On 08/09/2010 1:21 PM, Jeffrey Horner wrote:

Hi all,

I'm setting up a development environment on Windows as the subject
implies. I've downloaded and installed Rtools211.exe (will upgrade
later when necessary) and I've also downloaded and installed mingw
with the help of mingw-get.exe.

I come from a UNIX development background, so I'm at the bash shell
prompt for just about every step in R extenstion development. Question
is what is an appropriate environment for Windows development. What
shell do you use? Do you use cmd.exe with the PATH variable set up by
Rtools? Do you use the sh.exe that comes with Rtools? I've found the
bash shell from MinGW to be a pretty close equivalent to bash on UNIX.
Do you use something else?

I've used the bash shell in Cygwin for quite a few years, but I've been
planning a switch to MSYS sometime. ?Cygwin seems to have made some bad
decisions lately that make it harder and harder to work with.

This is great news! I don't know how I could survive without bash's vi
style editing and command completion...

Here's my PATH variable which sets the Rtools paths first, then MinGW:

hornerj at hornerj-win ~
$ echo $PATH
/c/Rtools/bin:/c/Rtools/perl/bin:/c/Rtools/MinGW/bin:/c/localbin:/mingw/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/lo
cal/bin:/c/Program Files (x86)/R/R-2.11.1/bin:/c/Program Files
(x86)/CollabNet/Subversion Client:
/c/Windows/system32:/c/Windows:/c/Windows/System32/Wbem:/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.
0/:/c/Program Files (x86)/MiKTeX 2.8/miktex/bin

I'm going to follow the "R Installation ..." manual to compile R on
Windows and learn a bit about the build process. From there, I intend
to "port" some open source libraries that have support for being
compiled with MS VC++ over to MinGW.

Aside from my PATH variable, are there other things about my
development environment I should be aware of?

Jeff