Building packages on Windows fails

Prof Brian Ripley schreef op de 7e dag van de wijnmaand van het jaar 2005:

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Peter Kleiweg wrote:

Duncan Murdoch schreef op de 6e dag van de wijnmaand van het jaar 2005:

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Peter Kleiweg wrote:

What has changed in R for Windows from version 1.7.1 to
2.2.0 that won't allow me to build binary packages?

Many things have changed; I don't know which is causing
the failure you see. One change is that instructions are
now collected in the Installation and Administration
manual. Try following the setup instructions there and see
if it still fails.

I can't find anything on building packages for Windows in
that manual.

Your problems was installing, so the section on `Installing
Packages' should help you.

Installing worked fine. Building a binary distribution (with
compiled help files) is what didn't work.

This worked fine:

   Rcmd build iL04

But that just gave a gzip'ed tarfile, not a zip-file, and
without the compiled helpfiles.

This didn't work:

   Rcmd build --force --binary iL04

I did find a solution to the problem. On a Linux install,
each package has a file CONTENTS. These are missing from the
Windows install. I copied those files from my Linux install
to my Windows install, and then I could build my own
package. So I guess, these CONTENTS files should be included
in the Windows install.

And indeed they are, as the presence of 500+ packages on CRAN
for Windows will show you.

Well, I just ran the install program for Windows, with compiled
html help, but without the ordinary html help files. In that
case, no CONTENTS files get installed.

The recommended way to build a binary package on Windows is

R CMD INSTALL --build

Yes, that works. Even without the CONTENTS files. And this is
recommended in the manual "Creating R packages", another manual
than Duncan Murdoch was referring to.

I was using a method that was recommended in earlier versions.
Perhaps that method should just be disabled, with a
message about the current method, instead of having it fail for
obscure reasons.