Updated Windows toolchain

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>  wrote:

An updated toolchain is now being used for Windows' builds of R-devel:
details are in the R-admin manual and at
http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/ and
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/

Thanks for the update.
I saw that
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/VERSION.txt
had the following contents:
Rtools version 2.15.0.1911

So I downloaded Rtools215.exe but when I installed it, the VERSION.txt
that was extracted read:
Rtools version 2.15.0.1908

...which is the same version I previously had installed.

Has the new version not propagated yet or is there some other issue?

Thanks,
Dan

Both 32- and 64-bit parts of the toolchain use v2.0.1 of the Mingw-w64
project's runtime and a beta of gcc 4.5.4: the Mingw.org project's builds
are no longer used.  This should mean that code which compiles for 64-bit
Windows also compiles for 32-bit Windows, and v.v. unless code makes
(incorrect but common) assumptions that pointers fit into longs.

A very few packages will need modifications because they contain
declarations which clash with the headers in this toolchain: where we are
aware of problems the maintainers have been informed.

At DLL level different Windows' toolchains should be compatible: at C level
they mostly are but at C++ level they are pretty much incompatible (so that
for example GDAL has to be re-compiled for every toolchain: and Rcpp users
need to be careful to use only one toolchain for Rcpp and their packages).
  All the external software previously made available (and more) is made
available at http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools .

The toolchain has support for OpenMP and pthreads: however OpenMP support is
not enabled by default in R (it is too slow to be much use).  If you do make
use of it in your packages, be aware that you will need to ship the
appropriate pthreads DLL(s).

It is expected that there will be several further minor updates prior to the
release of 2.15.0 in ca 4 months, but this step is the major one.

--
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