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Likely disruption to R-devel builds on Windows

10 messages · Brian Ripley, Simon Urbanek, Hadley Wickham +2 more

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We are planning to phase in some major changes to the R build process 
on Windows shortly, so expect problems and temporary unavailability of 
binary builds of R and of packages, and if you are building from 
sources, check out the latest version of the R-admin manual (in the 
sources) for the current state.

The planned changes are

- to move the 32-bit builds to MinGW's recent release of gcc 4.5.0 
(but with static linking of the Fortran and C++ runtimes: dynamic 
linking of C++ in packages crashes R).

- to merge the 32-bit and 64-bit builds into a single installer and 
(for at least 98% of CRAN) a single binary for each package.

NB: R-devel is not due for release until ca October and changes such 
as this are done early in the development cycle to allow plenty of 
time for them to be bedded down.  Please do take seriously the 
description as

R version 2.12.0 Under development (unstable) (2010-04-29 r51864)
                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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On Apr 30, 2010, at 4:20 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

            
To make sure no one has an excuse for not reading the current manuals - they are available (built nightly) at

http://r.research.att.com/man/

Cheers,
Simon
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Some easy way to find out what has changed would be desirable here.

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 9:03 AM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
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Maybe Duncan could apply the same script that's being used for RNEWS
to the manuals?  An RSS feed of changes to the manuals would be really
useful.

Hadley

On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Gabor Grothendieck
<ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:

  
    
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On 30/04/2010 10:22 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
My script is very NEWS specific.  The manuals would be harder.  You 
could get the diffs from svn pretty easily, but displaying them would be 
trickier:  do you display the diffs in the .texi source, or convert to 
HTML and display the diffs there, or what?  How much context around 
them?  Not impossible, but not trivial.

Duncan
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On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:39 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
Just making the source diffs easily accessible would be sufficient IMHO.

For example, go to this page:
   http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?do=recent
and click on any of the eyeglass symbols.
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I suspect the best combination of ease and quality of output would be
to output the texi to plain text, and then diff that.   I really like
the existing RNEWS format, but I guess you split the news into
individual entries and only display those with any changes.  It would
be a bit harder to do with general output, although maybe splitting
into paragraphs would be sufficient.

Hadley
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On 30/04/2010 10:48 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
That's already available, but not too pretty.  E.g.

svn log -v https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/doc/manual | less

will show something like

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r51865 | ripley | 2010-04-30 00:56:00 -0400 (Fri, 30 Apr 2010) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/doc/manual/R-admin.texi
   M /trunk/src/gnuwin32/CHANGES
   M /trunk/src/library/tools/R/install.R

tests starssrc/library/tools/R/install.R
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r51858 | ripley | 2010-04-29 00:51:01 -0400 (Thu, 29 Apr 2010) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/doc/manual/R-exts.texi

tweak wording
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r51854 | ripley | 2010-04-28 10:41:26 -0400 (Wed, 28 Apr 2010) | 1 line
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/doc/manual/R-exts.texi

more on portability
 (etc.)

and for particular details, you can do something like

svn diff -c 51858 https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/doc/manual

which will give

Index: R-exts.texi
===================================================================
--- R-exts.texi (revision 51857)
+++ R-exts.texi (revision 51858)
@@ -10813,10 +10813,10 @@

 The @R{} for Windows installers have for a long time allowed the value
 of @code{R_HOME} to be recorded in the Windows Registry: this is
-optional but the default. Where is it is recorded has changed over the
-years to allow for multiple versions of @R{} to be installed at once,
-and as from @R{} 2.11.0, to allow 32- and 64-bit versions of @R{} to be
-installed on the same machine.
+optional but selected by default.  @emph{Where} is it is recorded has
+changed over the years to allow for multiple versions of @R{} to be
+installed at once, and as from @R{} 2.11.0, to allow 32- and 64-bit
+versions of @R{} to be installed on the same machine.

 The basic Registry location is @code{Software\R-core\R}.  For an
 administrative install this is under @code{HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE} and on a

The non-trivial part is converting it into a nice display like what you 
pointed out in the Wiki.

Duncan Murdoch
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On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
If you could mirror the manuals to googlecode you would automatically
get an HTML interface to the diffs. e.g.

http://code.google.com/p/sqldf/source/list
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On 30/04/2010 2:11 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
Go for it.  You've got more experience with googlecode than I do.

Duncan Murdoch