R 3.0, Rtools3.0,l Windows7 64-bit, and permission agony

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

On 13-04-20 2:02 PM, Kevin Coombes wrote:

On 4/20/2013 12:54 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

On 13-04-20 12:30 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

On 13-04-20 11:09 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com>
wrote:

Just curious:  how often do you use the Windows find command?
We have
put
instructions in place for people to run the install process with a
renamed
Rtools find command (which I think is the only conflict). The
issue is
that
more users who want to use the command line commands are
familiar with
the
Unix variant (which came first, by the way) than the Windows
one, so
renaming the Rtools one would cause trouble for more people.

Its not just find - its also sort. And really R has no business
clobbering built in Windows commands. This is just wrong and really
causes anyone who does any significant amount of Windows batch
programming (or uses batch programs of any complexity) endless
problems.

Which is presumably why Rtools doesn't modify the path by default.

Better solutions (e.g. Rstudio and devtools) temporarily set the path
on when you're calling R CMD *.

I am well aware of the various kludges to address this including my
own batchfiles ( http://batchfiles.googlecode.com ) which handles this
by temporarily changing the path as well; however, the real problem is
that Rtools does not play nice with Windows and that needs to be
addressed directly.

It has been.  You ignored it.

Duncan Murdoch

If some change to address this has been made that would be great but
there is no mention of it on the Rtools page in the change history
section (the only documented change relates to the png/tiff/jpeg
libraries), there was no announcement that I saw and Rtools\bin still
contains find and sort so what specifically is the change?

It's not a change to Rtools, it's a change is to the build system in
R:  it allows you to rename sort or find in your own copy of Rtools,
and R will use whatever you specify.  You were informed of this when I
did it in 2007, and I've mentioned it when the topic comes up here,
most recently in the message quoted above.  That's a long time ago, so
I don't remember if you tried it then, but I've never heard a
complaint from anyone else that it doesn't work.

Duncan Murdoch

How do you do that?  (More explicitly, what steps would I have to take
to redefine things like find.exe and sort.exe in Rtools so that R would
know how to find them and use them? I can't figure that out from the
earlier parts of these messages.)

Rename them to whatever you want in the Rtools install, then edit the
definitions.  I think currently they are in src/gnuwin32/Makefile and
src/gnuwin32/MkRules (one in each), but I'd suggest you just search files
named M* for the strings "sort" and "find", in case I've got it wrong, or it
has changed since the last time I looked.

If you try to build R itself rather than just packages, you may need to do
more edits, because some of the makefiles for things like the jpeg libraries
weren't written by us, and may have these commands hard-coded.

Are you suggesting that R itself be rebuild?  Rtools be rebuilt?  Some
clarity on this and the process to do it would be helpful.  I was
really looking for a way to do this with an out of the box R
installation since from a practical viewpoint few are going to want to
build their own software.