R/CRAN switch to UCRT on Windows

Thank you, Tomas, for your hard work on the new toolchain, its
documentation, and all your efforts in providing patches for R and for
several contributed packages.

Best,
Uwe



On 08.12.2021 14:56, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
> Please note an update concerning the support of UTF-8 as native encoding
> on Windows, which may at this point be of interest particularly to
> developers of packages with native code and to R users using R-devel
> (the development version of R) on Windows:
>
> https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/2021/12/07/upcoming-changes-in-r-4.2-on-windows/
>
>
> The key part is that CRAN will switch the incoming checks of R packages
> on Windows to a new toolchain targeting UCRT on Monday, December 13.
>
> It may take up to several days for all systems to synchronize and during
> this time, it may be difficult to build R-devel on Windows from source
> or to install packages.  After the switch, the snapshot R-devel builds
> and binary package builds provided by CRAN will be built using the new
> toolchain for UCRT. These new builds will use UTF-8 as the native
> encoding on recent Windows.
>
> These builds will be incompatible with the previous builds for MSVCRT
> and installed/binary packages will be incompatible as well. The
> recommended/simplest course of action for R-devel users is to uninstall
> the old build of R-devel, RTools, delete the old package libraries, and
> then install the new versions.
>
> Checks of CRAN packages with the new toolchain have been running since
> March with results available on CRAN pages. By now, most packages are
> working, but some packages using native (C, C++, Fortran) code still
> have to be updated. The Winbuilder service and R-hub support the new
> toolchain, there is also support/example for using github actions. The
> builds of R-devel and CRAN (and recommended binary packages) with the
> new toolchain are available regularly since March.
>
> I've created patches for CRAN (and required Bioconductor packages) which
> are installed automatically at package installation time by R. This
> feature will be also in R-devel after the switch and will be used
> temporarily to give package authors more time to fix their packages. Uwe
> Ligges, other CRAN team members and I have also been in touch with some
> package authors, providing advice how to fix their packages, when the
> issues required more explanation. I am prepared to help the remaining
> authors as well if needed.
>
> Please see the blog post and materials linked from there for more
> details and feel free to ask questions.
>
> Thanks
> Tomas
>
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