Following considerable off list discussion, I will post this on the list in the hope that it may help others who experience the same grief I did getting R sources to build on Windows.
Firstly there is just no way that, starting with a clean version of Windows 2003 server, and following the instructions provided in the Admin and Installation manual, web sites and various FAQs, I could get a working build setup. I can only conclude that all the users actually building R on Windows have some software installed that is not in the documentation. The following recipe does work repeatably for me. Install the following third party packages as mentioned in the install manuals and Duncan Murdoch's Rtools page: Tcl/tk support libpng libjpeg BLAS (I used ATLAS) ActiveState PERL Microsoft HTML Help Workshop MikTek Inno Setup 5 iconv.dll MinGW-4.1.0 Duncan Murdoch's page on using MikTek is good but but more complicated than it needs to be. The only problem with the default e- TeX enhanced mode seems to be with the texinfo sources. So only the tex and pdftex commands need to be reset to use e-TeX compatibility mode. latex and pdflatex are only used to process the tex sources for the Reference manual and these have no problem with the current MikTek defaults. The issue with MikTek finding the Rd.sty file is more easily fixed by minor changes to doc/manual/Makefile.win. Change lines 21 - 24 of doc/manual/Makefile.win to read: > RTEX= > ifeq ($(strip $(MIKTEX)),YES) > # Setup MikTEX search path > RTEX=-include-directory=$(RHOME)/share/texmf > endif > > PDFLATEX = pdflatex $(RTEX) > LATEX = latex $(RTEX) > PDFTEX = pdftex $(RTEX) > TEX = tex $(RTEX) So far this all fairly much as the instructions. However, I had no joy getting the Rtools package to provide the rest of what I needed. All my build attempts failed with path errors of one sort or another. Instead I used the Msys 1.0.10 package from MinGW. This provides a minimal set of build tools which includes everything needed except zip.exe and unzip.exe. I used the ones from Rtools and put them in the msys\1.0\local\bin. The only remaining problem was that the makeinfo.exe in Msys is too old. So I used the Msys set up to build makeinfo from texinfo-4.7 sources. This also needed wget and libiconv, which I also built from current sources. The binaries need to go in msys\1.0\local so that they have precedence over the older ones in the msys package. When this was done I had a totally MinGW build setup with no Cygwin binaries and everything understanding the same MinGW path conventions ie C:\foo\bar, C:/foo/bar or /c/foo/bar. I did not need to make any modifications to the Windows PATH other than those made automatically by the installers for the various packages. It all works very nicely to build R from sources using 'make distribution' as described in the manual. If anyone would like a copy of the makeinfo binary to save the trouble of building it, please email me. One final note: If you install the MinGW Msys-DTK rename the perl binaries such as perl.exe which it provides. Otherwise they will be used instead of the ActiveState ones and they don't work. Cheers Bill Northcott ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
