Building R forr Windows (was Adding Tk extensions to R for windows)

Have you tried to make R under MSYS/MinGW, there would seem to be some
obvious benefits to this over the current collection of Cygwin tools? In the
end I don't think a separate windows install of R should be needed... in
much the same way as the separate apple mac install has been discontinued in
1.8.0 now they have the osX/fink setup. I've had a play at configuring and
making R with MSYS and I seem to be able to get quite a long way down the
process, but I'd be interested in your views since you obviously have much
more experience in this area.

Regards,
John Marsland

-----Original Message-----
From: wettenhall@wehi.EDU.AU [mailto:wettenhall@wehi.EDU.AU]
Sent: 30 September 2003 08:42
To: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: [Rd] Adding Tk extensions to R for windows


Hi,

I'm developing an R/TclTk application which uses the BWidget and
Tktable Tk extensions and I'm trying to make it easy to install.
For now, I'm focusing on Windows users who start with nothing.

I have built Tcl/Tk and Tktable for windows using Msys/MinGW.
(BWidget contains only Tcl scripts so does not need building.)
I have then copied Tktable and BWidget into the lib subdirectory
of the Tcl directory in R source, created by unzipping R_Tcl.zip
from Brian Ripley's webpage.  (I should also try creating the
entire R_Tcl.zip myself, rather than mixing and matching.)
Finally I have followed the instructions in src/gnuwin32/INSTALL
including "make distribution" which has built
an R installation wizard including the Tk extensions.

It seems to work fine and I don't think I've violated any
license agreements - it's my understanding that Tktable and
BWidget source (both on sourceforge) are under BSD, like the other
Tcl already included with R.

Of course some would say that you can build faster and smaller Tcl
libraries using Visual C++.  I didn't notice much difference with my
application running Tktable.  I did try buildling Tcl/Tk with the
free version of VC++.NET SDK but nmake -f makefile.vc in
Tcl_source/win/ complained that vcvars32.bat needed to be run.  The
latest version of the (free) VC++.NET SDK seems to only have 
sdkvars.bat,
which does something similar to vcvars32.bat (i.e. set PATH, INCLUDE,
LIB and NetSamplePath), but running it didn't seem to help so I turned
to Msys/MinGW.  Maybe I should buy the full Visual C++/Visual Studio?

I'm wondering whether anyone would like to point out any potential
problems (license or otherwise) with distributing a customized R
installation wizard.

Also, I would be happy to become involved in the maintenance/testing
of R_Tcl.zip for windows if I'm qualified, but I suppose this would
require buying the full Visual C++/Visual Studio, right?

If there is sufficient building/testing from volunteers, are 
the R core
developers considering bundling more Tcl/Tk packages with R, 
or does the
problem of HOW MANY packages/megabytes to add mean that there 
would always
have to be a separate "batteries included" installation wizard?

Regards,
James

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