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R Package Building Question

Brett Presnell 
I'll start with my apologies to Martin for sending those last two of
message to the list owner (the last one he forwarded was actually sent
a week or two ago and must have been lost in the ether somehow). This
is basically due to fast copy/paste in emacs without paying much
attention to what I'm doing.  Lack of sleep is my excuse, but I don't
know if that goes very far with the hardworking R developers (does
Brian Ripley ever sleep?).

I would also like to add to the kudos for the R core team (and all the
other contributors as well).  Amazingly good work!  The development of
R changes things in a very significant and positive way for many of us
(and our students too).

Finally, I have a question that about building R Packages.  I've read
through the docs and looked into some of the contributed packages, but
I cannot seem to figure this out.  I've put together a very small
package of datasets and a few simple convenience functions for an
undergraduate class.  There are only 4 or 5 functions in the package
at present, and they are all in one file under the R subdirectory of
the package.  I'm having trouble getting this to work under both
Windows-9x and on the UNIX side because of the following:

1. If this file is named R/sta4504 (with no extension), then when I
build the package (under Solaris), create a zip file and install the
package on a Windows PC, it works fine.  However, under Solaris,
R INSTALL sta4504 hangs and does not complete the installation of the
package.

2. If this file is named R/sta4504.R, then the package installs and
works fine on the Solaris machine, but the same package is not
recognized as even existing by R under Windows.

I notice that most (all?) of the contributed packages leave off the
extension, in spite of the advice to the contrary (at least to my
reading) in Section 1.1.3 of "Writing R Extensions", and they all work
on both platforms.  I don't remember ever seeing this come up on the
list, so what am I missing?

In case it matters, I'm running R 0.99.0 on both platforms (I guess
I'll be upgrading the Solaris side this weekend).  The version of
Win95 is several years old (mid 1996, version 4.00.950a it says).
Solaris is 2.6.

Thread (3 messages)

Brett Presnell R Package Building Question Mar 1 Thomas Lumley R Package Building Question Mar 1 Brian Ripley R Package Building Question Mar 1