Problem building (binary) packages for Windows
That version of R-devel is not current, so please update it. I think it might have been in an interval where we tried out verious fixes for building bundles and some of them broke other things. In general if you use R-devel or R-patched you need to update before reporting any difficulties. 'Under development' needs to be taken seriously.
On Fri, 15 May 2009, Peter Ruckdeschel wrote:
Hi,
I am having a problem building binary packages for
Windows recently.
Normally, I use the "Murdoch-Sutherland" tool set,
http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/
just build source packages by
R CMD build <pkgname>
and install these with
R CMD INSTALL <pkgname>
But now, for someone without having this tool set installed,
under Win XP, with R-2.10dev (details below), I tried
building a binary version with
R CMD build --binary <pkgname>
which used to work for me until recently (unfortunately I
cannot specify "recently" here...)
Trying to install the created .zip file with
utils:::menuInstallLocal()
I get an error message
"
package 'distr' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
Error in unpackPkg(pkgs[i], pkgnames[i], lib) :
malformed bundle DESCRIPTION file, no Contains field
"
Now AFAICS I have not tried to build a bundle ...
Searching the help archives, I found a posting by Uwe Ligges,
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.r.general/64574/
saying that
R CMD INSTALL --build
was preferable to
R CMD build --binary
--- in which respect? Would this avoid the error message?
That's rather old as well: now the second calls the first on Windows. What may matter is whether you specify -l on R CMD INSTALL --build (R CMD build --binary does), as installing into the main library does a better job of resolving HTML cross links. So the advice is to use R CMD INSTALL --build *and* install into the main library (or the library where you install all your add-on packages).
So far I have not come across this error message, and
packages I built with
R CMD build --binary
installed correctly with
utils:::menuInstallLocal()
Actually, the corresponding zip-file containes
a second DESCRIPTION file in the top folder, like a
bundle, which I think is the culpit, and after
deleting this installation worked out fine.
Could you please check what caused this second
DESCRIPTION file to be generated?
Any suggestions welcome,
Best, Peter
--------------------------------------------------
platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch i386
os mingw32
system i386, mingw32
status Under development (unstable)
major 2
minor 10.0
year 2009
month 04
day 26
svn rev 48404
language R
version.string R version 2.10.0 Under development (unstable) (2009-04-26
r48404)
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