Building package under windows which links against a cygwin library

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

On 11/11/2009 6:49 PM, Cameron Bracken wrote:

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
wrote:

On 11/11/2009 4:41 PM, Cameron Bracken wrote:

I am developing a package
(http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/swfdevice/) which links against
the ming C library. The package builds fine under Mac OS X and Linux.
I am really out of my element on windows, but I know there is a cygwin
package for libming.

My question is, does anyone have advice/examples on linking R packages
against cygwin libraries?  Is this even possible?  How would I go
about writing a configure.win script to do this?

I suspect it's not going to work.  Linking to any Cygwin library will
pull in the rest, and I would guess that will conflict with something else
in R, which does not use Cygwin.

I figured that would be the case.

What you could do is include a copy of the source to the ming library,
and get the regular R compilers to compile it.  I just tried, and it
compiled without errors (though there were a few warnings).  Then you can
write your R interface to it, and everything may just work.

Hey, that is great! I thought about doing this but decided arbitrarily
that it would be too hard.  Do I just plop a copy of the ming source
in the src/ directory of my package (then adjust Makevars
accordingly)?  Did you run the whole ming configure script as well?

I just ran make.  I don't think there is any configure script.

I'd probably put their stuff in a subdir of src, just to keep it cleanly
separated from yours.  This also gives you the option of *not* compiling it
on systems like Linux and MacOS that already have it.  Then make up a
Makevars.win file that builds it as a static or dynamic lib on Windows and
links to it, and a Makevars file that just links to it on other platforms.
 (You might want to do a static compile on the other systems just so you're
protected against version changes.)

Duncan Murdoch

Thanks for the feedback, I agree that would be the easiest and
preferable way.  But which version of ming are you using that only has
a makefile? The version I need (0.4.0 beta5) has a fairly involved
configure script.  I would have to pick out the components I need for
my package and create a custom makefile for it to be easily usable
(which I may end up doing, thank goodness for open source).