Rcmd SHLIB error
On Sun, 19 Dec 2010, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 19/12/2010 6:06 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 8:23 PM, Dominick Samperi<djsamperi at gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
I am getting this error message when I try to run Rcmd SHLIB myprog.c. There appears to be a missing / between etc and i386 in the path. I am on Windows Vista and am using R version 2.12.1 Patched (2010-12-16 r53864) and just downloaded Rtools 2.12 today. Is this a bug in R? How can I resolve this?
This is due to new behavior in CYGWIN (the basis for Rtools). The new CYGWIN does not like non-standard paths that have C: in them. Some CYGWIN programs will not work when fed file names using this syntax, but normally this is just a warning. The warning can be suppressed by using the Control Panel to set CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning. Another solution is to use POSIX equivalent paths of the form /cydrive/c/PROG..., but this would require more extensive changes to build scripts, etc. There is another change that causes Rtools tar to choke in some circumstances under Windows because it tries to change ownership of the files extracted when it shouldn't. These error messags can be suppressed by using the Control Panel to set TAR_OPTIONS=--no-same-owner.
All of which is in the manual (including what the circumstances are).
I am still wondering what to do about this? I have created a directory called C:\PROGRA~1\R\R-212~1.X\etci386 and have copied Makeconf into it. That lets me use Rcmd SHLIB but its quite an ugly workaround and there must be some better resolution than that. Also I am wondering if this same problem will crop up elsewhere.
You could try running within Cygwin, as I do, on the theory that what works for me might work for you. I do use the "nodosfilewarning" setting as Dominick mentioned. However, I will say that my Windows build system is much less reliable than it used to be. I don't know the cause: I started 64 bit builds on Windows 7 at around the same time as I upgraded Cygwin, so it could be any of those causes. I'm tending to believe it's a Cygwin problem or a Cygwin-Win7 incompatibility, but I haven't had time to work out a reliable system. (Symptoms I see are that very few overnight builds are succeeding; almost all the ones you see on CRAN/bin/windows/base have required manual restarts after they've failed partway through.) Unfortunately, I am not going to have the time to diagnose or fix this in the next couple of months. If you have spare time, you might want to try older versions of the Rtools (perhaps mixing new compilers with old Rtools/bin and Cygwin DLLs).
It seems to be the updated Cygwin in Rtools: working in 64-bit Win7 is very reliable for me (by the standards of Windows) using the pre-October version: the October update fails more often than not when building R from scratch (e.g. sh or make hangs). People using 32-bit XP seem to have more success with the latest version.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595