I have just got a new machine and had a basic cygwin installed before it was given to me. It didn't include make. Previously I have installed Rtools to build packages and now I have got myself a bit confused as to whether to just install make from the cygwin packages or to install rtools. I would welcome any advice. I had a look at the rtools section in the Administration Manual and the rtools site without gaining sufficient enlightenment to proceed. I am running Windows Vista and R 2.6.2 David Scott _________________________________________________________________ David Scott Department of Statistics, Tamaki Campus The University of Auckland, PB 92019 Auckland 1142, NEW ZEALAND Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86830 Fax: +64 9 373 7000 Email: d.scott at auckland.ac.nz Graduate Officer, Department of Statistics Director of Consulting, Department of Statistics
Cygwin and Rtools
3 messages · David Scott, Duncan Murdoch, Brian Ripley
David Scott wrote:
I have just got a new machine and had a basic cygwin installed before it was given to me. It didn't include make. Previously I have installed Rtools to build packages and now I have got myself a bit confused as to whether to just install make from the cygwin packages or to install rtools. I would welcome any advice. I had a look at the rtools section in the Administration Manual and the rtools site without gaining sufficient enlightenment to proceed. I am running Windows Vista and R 2.6.2
If you want to build R or R packages, you should install Rtools, with the Rtools/bin directory ahead of Cygwin in your PATH. If you want to build Cygwin apps, you'll want to put Rtools later (or not mention it at all), because Rtools is set up to build native Windows binaries, not Cygwin-linked ones. Rtools includes a subset of the Cygwin tools; it's possible that Cygwin has newer versions of some of them, but you don't always want them. In particular, make and tar from Cygwin won't work to build R. See the README.txt file in the Rtools (http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/README.txt) for details. The other complication with having both Rtools and Cygwin installed is that they both have copies of the Cygwin dlls. You want the latest versions. Rtools has fairly recent ones, but Cygwin's may be newer. Duncan Murdoch
You need Rtools and not Cygwin. In particular, the make is different, and the Cygwin one will not work. I don't know where the confusion comes from: nothing in the R documentation suggests using Cygwin. I believe that these days when Cygwin is installed it does not put itself in the Windows path, so you don't even need to know it is installed. (I do have it installed on one of my boxes just to test Cygwin builds of R -- Cygwin as a Unix-alike.)
On Thu, 20 Mar 2008, David Scott wrote:
I have just got a new machine and had a basic cygwin installed before it was given to me. It didn't include make. Previously I have installed Rtools to build packages and now I have got myself a bit confused as to whether to just install make from the cygwin packages or to install rtools. I would welcome any advice. I had a look at the rtools section in the Administration Manual and the rtools site without gaining sufficient enlightenment to proceed. I am running Windows Vista and R 2.6.2 David Scott
_________________________________________________________________ David Scott Department of Statistics, Tamaki Campus The University of Auckland, PB 92019 Auckland 1142, NEW ZEALAND Phone: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86830 Fax: +64 9 373 7000 Email: d.scott at auckland.ac.nz Graduate Officer, Department of Statistics Director of Consulting, Department of Statistics ______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
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