[R-pkg-devel] Anyone Know How To Setup Wine for Windows Testing?

Mon, Sep 21, 2020 9:35 AM

Getting R to run well on Wine would be really neat.  Here are some
additional comments that might encourage someone to move this forward.

On Ubuntu 18.04, you can install and run R 3.6.0 on Wine as:

curl -O https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/old/3.6.0/R-3.6.0-win.exe
wine R-3.6.0-win.exe /SILENT
wine start "%ProgramW6432%/R/R-3.6.0/bin/i386/R"

However, for me, never versions of R (e.g. R 3.6.1) fail to install
with an error "This program does not support the version of Windows
your computer is running."  This is with the current stable version of
Wine is 5.0.2 (August 2020) available from https://www.winehq.org/.
(If you struggle to install Wine (>= 4.5) on Ubuntu 18.04, see also
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1145473/how-do-i-install-libfaudio0).
I observed the same with Wine 3.0.


Some more comments: Back in 2016 I was looking into running R on Wine
via futures.  This could make it possible to access features in
Windows-only R packages from R sessions running Linux.  I only spent
so much time on it before concluding it wasn't stable and not worth my
time to investigate further.  For instance, I managed to launch a Wine
background worker as in:

rscript <- c("wine", "start", "/Unix",
normalizePath("~/.wine/drive_c/Program\
Files/R/R-3.5.1/bin/i386/Rscript.exe", mustWork = TRUE))
cl <- future::makeClusterPSOCK(1L, rscript=rscript, verbose=TRUE)

but only when running 32-bit Wine.  On 64-bit Wine is stalled.

/Henrik

On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 7:16 AM Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalibera at gmail.com> wrote:

On 9/18/20 11:56 PM, Steve Bronder wrote:

inline


On Wed, Sep 9, 2020 at 3:35 AM Tomas Kalibera
<tomas.kalibera at gmail.com <mailto:tomas.kalibera at gmail.com>> wrote:

    On 7/16/20 7:57 PM, Steve Bronder wrote:

    > On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 2:22 PM Neal Fultz <nfultz at gmail.com

    <mailto:nfultz at gmail.com>> wrote:

    >> If you don't mind multi-gig docker containers, this can be helpful:
    >>
    >> https://github.com/scottyhardy/docker-wine
    >>
    >> It doesn't work with 64 bit versions of R as far as I could

    tell, but 32

    >> bit did install and start correctly in a few clicks when I

    tried last year.

>>

    > Thanks! I'm hoping if I can get this all working locally I can put
    > everything into a docker container for other folks. At this

    point I have R

    > up and running and it can install binary packages, but there are

    some

    > terrible terrible Cygwin/Rtools errors I can't figure out. In

    particular

    > this warning / message seems worrisome
    >
    > Cygwin WARNING:
    >    Couldn't compute FAST_CWD pointer.  This typically occurs if

    you're using

    >    an older Cygwin version on a newer Windows.  Please update to

    the latest

    >    available Cygwin version from https://cygwin.com/. If the problem
    > persists,
    >    please see https://cygwin.com/problems.html
    >
    > If anyone has interest I can post a script for setting up the

    wine instance

    > as far as I can get atm.

    Did you have any update on this? If there is a problem with MinGW-w64
    version, you can (just for experimentation) try UCRT demo build,
    which
    uses a newer version of MinGW-w64 than RTools 4:


So this worked with a patched version of wine. that fixed the above
error. I'm waiting for that patch to go in and for the next wine
release to try this again.

Thanks!


    https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/2020/07/30/windows/utf-8-build-of-r-and-cran-packages/index.html
    (reference at very bottom)

    > On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 10:56 AM J C Nash <profjcnash at gmail.com

    <mailto:profjcnash at gmail.com>> wrote:

    >>> Are you sure you want to try to run R etc. under Wine?
    >>>

    > Do I want to? No :-). But we (Stan) want to use flto and are

    seeing errors

    > on windows I want to be able to debug locally.

    Please note Brian Ripley has added/improved support for
    cross-compiling
    on Linux for Windows, so that it can be used for diagnosing LTO
    warnings
    (see NEWS in R-devel and src/gnuwin32/README.compilation). The
    cross-compilers and needed cross-compiled libraries for R itself are
    part of at least some Linux distributions (he tested on Fedora).


Yes very exciting!

    >>> - If you have Windows running, either directly or in a VM, you

    can run R

    >>> there.
    >>>

    > Sadly I don't have access to a windows machine. If I can't

    figure this out

    > then I'll probably just get a windows aws instance. But it would

    be nice

    > for people to have a wine setup they could test locally on.

    Microsoft is giving for free time-limited VMs primarily for testing
    Edge/MSIE, you can run them in e.g. in Virtualbox. As instructed
    in the
    VM, take snapshots often.


We have a Jenkins box that we use to spinup AWS windows sessions when
we need to thoroughly debug now but ty for the info!

    >> - If you have Windows and want to run R under some other OS,

    then set up a

    >>> VM
    >>> e.g., Linux Mint, for that. I sometimes test R for Windows in a
    >>> VirtualBox VM
    >>> for Win10, but generally run in Linux Mint. I've also run R in

    some Linux

    >>> VMs
    >>> to test for specific dependencies in some distros.
    >>>
    >>> I rather doubt R will run very well in Linux under Wine. My

    experience

    >>> with Wine
    >>> is that a few apps (e.g. Irfanview) run well, but many give

    lots of

    >>> trouble.
    >>>

    > Yes I'm 80/20 on whether compilation with Rtools will totally

    work on wine.

    > But if I can get this all setup and put it into a docker file I

    think it

    > will be useful for other people as well so it's worth spending a

    bit of

    > time on.

    Being able to test R on Wine may be useful, if you figure it out, I
    would be interested to learn more. It is easier to obtain, may be
    easier
    to automate, and some low-level bugs may be easier to diagnose. Of
    course, for the price of sometimes seeing errors not present on real
    Windows.


Do you think there would be more false positives or true negatives?
That was my one big concern since it's just emulating the actual
windows software environment.

An (expensive) way to try out would be to run all CRAN/BIOC checks on
Windows and in Wine and compare the results.  Things breaking in Wine,
but not in Windows: hopefully often it would be clear immediately from
Wine messages in many cases that it is a Wine issue. Also it may be a
real problem that just does not map to a failure on Windows. Things
working in Wine, but breaking in Windows, hopefully would be uncommon.

If Wine turns up usable for this, we could legally distribute a virtual
disk with say R-devel and free applications needed by it, with a simple
script that would just run a package check there on any Linux
distribution. Maybe even as a docker/singularity image. This should make
it easy and fast for Linux users to check their packages (of course,
this can't replace completely testing on Windows, and there is
winbuilder and rhub, too).

That is in addition to the added flexibility of debugging the low-level
bugs having the source code for the "OS".

Best
Tomas

    Best
    Tomas

    >>> JN
    >>>
    >>>
    >>> On 2020-07-15 1:17 p.m., Steve Bronder wrote:

    >>>> Does anyone know of a setup guide for getting R and Rtools

    4.0 up and

    >>>> running on Wine with the Windows Server 2008 R2 VM? Do other

    maintainers

    >>>> with more knowhow think that would be useful for debugging

    purposes?

    >>>>
    >>>> I've been trying to test out some flto gcc things for windows by

    >>> setting up

    >>>> a local wine VM on my ubuntu box. Wine has an option for

    Windows Server

    >>>> 2008 R2 (which I believe is the windows session CRAN uses?)

    If anyone

    >>> has

    >>>> done this before and knows of a guide somewhere that would be

    very

    >>> helpful!

    >>>> Regards,
    >>>>
    >>>> Steve Bronder
    >>>>
    >>>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
    >>>>
    >>>> ______________________________________________
    >>>> R-package-devel at r-project.org

    <mailto:R-package-devel at r-project.org> mailing list

    >>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
    >>>>

    >>> ______________________________________________
    >>> R-package-devel at r-project.org

    <mailto:R-package-devel at r-project.org> mailing list

    >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel

>>

    > - Steve Bronder
    >
    >       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
    >
    > ______________________________________________
    > R-package-devel at r-project.org

    <mailto:R-package-devel at r-project.org> mailing list

    > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel


- Steve Bronder



        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

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[R-pkg-devel] Anyone Know How To Setup Wine for Windows Testing?

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