Creating a minimal package

3 messages · Dirk Eddelbuettel, Duncan Murdoch

Tue, Jul 13, 2004 9:02 AM #

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 08:49:04 -0500, Douglas Bates
<bates@stat.wisc.edu> wrote :

Yes, I think that's right.  Currently the roadblocks are:

 - Perl 

I think we could write around this.

 - Microsoft Help Compiler

Users who don't have it could do without CHM help files.

 - Lots of Cygwin (and other) tools involved in making packages.

We could possibly rewrite the build process in R, but I don't think we
should.  I think a better solution would be to distribute the toolset
with R.  The full toolset doesn't add up to much (maybe 1.5 M).  A
problem is that multiple Cygwin versions don't coexist nicely, so we'd
have to be careful during installation.

 - MinGW gcc

Users who want to compile code would still have to install the
compiler.

Duncan

Dirk Eddelbuettel

Tue, Jul 13, 2004 11:20 AM #

On Tue, Jul 13, 2004 at 10:02:16AM -0400, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

Is that worth it?  ActiveState Perl is easy to install.

I built local packages for years, and only added this tool fairly recently
(mostly to suppress the error/warning during build).  As I don't use html
help, I obviously didn't care much.  

Non-issue in my biased book, but I acknowledge that this is probably a
minority view. That said, this is likely to be non-redistributable, so a
case could be made that as a user needs to download this anyway, how much
harder is it to download the free-as-in-beer Perl?

Neat idea. I like that a lot. I can see how some users would have Perl and
Cygwin, and even MinGW, anyway, but not the BDR tools collection. This helps.

And that's where it gets hairy. So we do all this to let lusers build R-only
packages, but not compiled packages?  Isn't that both a little inconsistent
and confusing?

But we could rewrite MinGW gcc in R too.

Dirk

PS Yes, I am of course joking w.r.t. MinGW

Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
                                                -- Groucho Marx

Duncan Murdoch

Tue, Jul 13, 2004 12:47 PM #

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 11:20:36 -0500, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>
wrote :

I think it's worth it if someone else does the work, but so far I
haven't thought it's worthwhile enough to do the work myself.

The reason is that it would simplify support and maintenance if the R
installer could install a complete R system.  We can't do that, but
the fewer "and then you need to..." instructions we have, the better.

The difference is that package installation works without it, it just
does a more complete job if you have it.  Currently installation
doesn't work at all without Perl.

Lots and lots of users have compilers other than MinGW.  This would
allow them to install their own packages built with those compilers.

I just tried this:

+ }

Creating directories ...
Creating DESCRIPTION ...
Creating READMEs ...
Saving functions and data ...
Making help files ...
Done.
Further steps are described in ./Rgcc/README 

When I have time I'll work through the README and finish it off.

Duncan Murdoch