Development environment for R extentions on Windows
On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 6:39 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
On 08/09/2010 5:37 PM, Jeffrey Horner wrote:
On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Jeffrey Horner <jeffrey.horner at gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
?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.
From the MinGW bash shell, the R build went quite smoothly. However, I did run into trouble with temporary files. I got around it by specifying TMPDIR like so: $ cd R_HOME/src/gnuwin32 $ TMPDIR=. /c/Rtools/bin/make all
I don't know if anything would go wrong, but I'd avoid putting your temp dir into the source tree. ?On my home machine I normally set R_USER to a Windows-style path (with backslashes), and that seems to work. ?On my work machine I think I set TMPDIR explicitly, but I forget what value I used.
If I didn't set TMPDIR, it would default to /tmp and the failure would occur within the mkR target of R_HOME/share/make/basepkg.mk. For reasons beyond me, the shell environment that's entered within the mkR target has no notion of a root directory. Anyone else seen this?
I'm not sure you're using the write make procedure. ?Are you running make from within src/gnuwin32, so you get the Makefile there? ?It shouldn't try to use /tmp (but things might have changed recently).
I was (see above), and I think I've found the culprit. R_HOME/share/make/basepkg.mk is utilized by both the UNIX and Windows build, and its target mkR will expand the shell variable f to a suitable path under /tmp if TMPDIR is not set. Rtools' shell (forked by make) has no notion of a root file system at /, so /tmp is never found. The solution is to, of course, always set TMPDIR to a suitable directory before invoking make. Surprisingly, setting TMPDIR=/tmp actually works since make expands it to the user's temporary folder. On my windows laptop, that's: /cygdrive/c/Users/hornerj/AppData/Local/Temp Jeff
Duncan Murdoch
Jeff
Aside from my PATH variable, are there other things about my development environment I should be aware of? Jeff