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R Package Building Question

3 messages · Brett Presnell, Thomas Lumley, Brian Ripley

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.
Thomas Lumley
#
On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Brett Presnell wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
What you're missing is that Unix packages are source code and Windows
packages are compiled. It's less obvious when there isn't any C or Fortran
code.  This is because typical Windows installations lack not only
compilers for C and Fortran but also the tools to process help pages.

In source form the package/R directory contains one or more files with
extensions .R (or .r, .q or various other possibilities), the package/src
directory has C or Fortran source code, package/man has .Rd files.

In compiled form package/R has a single file whose name is the name of the
package, the /src subdirectory is replaced by a /libs subdirectory with a
shared library, the /man subdirectory is replaced by one or more
subdirectories with various compiled help files.

So, sta4504.tgz should be a source package, with extensions, sta4504.zip
should be a compiled package, with no extensions.  There would be other 
differences if you had help pages for the functions.


	-thomas

Thomas Lumley
Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
University of Washington, Seattle






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      Brian Ripley
    

    

      
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On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Thomas Lumley wrote:

        

            

      
      
      
    

        
I don't think you *install*ed on Windows. I think you unpacked it.
(To install it, you use make pkg-sta4504.)

            

      
      
      
    

        
Did you *install* it under Windows, or did you just plonk it in the
library directory?

            

      
      
      
    

        
Another way of putting this. What goes in the R_HOME/library directory
on either platform is an installed package. What is distributed in the main
CRAN directory is source packages.  What is in the Windows-NT/contrib
directory is a dump of an installed package, not a source package.