John,

Taking this off-list. I suspect this is pretty much unique to you, but we will see. I am about to add a para to 'Writing R Extensions' along the lines of

'Where a non-POSIX file system is in use which does not utilize execute permissions, some care is needed with permissions. This applies on Windows and to e.g. FAT-formatted drives and SMB-mounted file systems on other OSes. The ‘mode’ of the file recorded in the tarball will be whatever file.info() returns. On Windows this will record only directories with execute permission and on other OSes it is likely that all files have reported ‘mode’ 0777. A particular issue is packages being built on Windows which are intended to contain executable scripts such as configure and cleanup: it is difficult to include these from Windows but where Cygwin has been used to set a POSIX-like mode, using environment variable R_BUILD_TAR=tar.exe may provide a workaround.'

Brian

On 15/04/2013 21:28, John Fox wrote:
Dear Brian,

I hope that I can clarify the issue and not confuse it further. I apologize if 
I was less than clear.

I originally built the tarball for the sem package on my Windows 7 system using "R 
CMD build" via RStudio with R 3.0.0. Both my Windows 7 system and the Windows 8 
system that I subsequently also used to build the package tarball use the NTFS file 
system. Of course, these are Windows file systems and don't use the Unix permission 
scheme, but there are apparently permissions recorded in the tarball, and they caused 
problems for you when I submitted the package to CRAN. The permissions are visible when I 
look inside the tarball, e.g., with 7zip.

When I rebuilt the package using "R CMD build" with R 2.15.2 (as opposed to 
3.0.0) on both of these Windows systems, the permissions inside the tarball were correct.

I never built the package on my Linux system, although I did try building it on 
my Mac. I obtained correct permissions inside the tarball when I did, which 
isn't surprising.

If it's the case that package tarballs built under Windows don't have execute 
permissions set where these are needed (as for cleanup), won't you have the 
same problem when such tarballs are submitted to CRAN that you had with the sem 
package?

Also, I'm still not clear why the execute permissions were set properly when I 
created the tarball having set R_BUILD_TAR=tar or using R 2.15.2.

To reiterate, if this issue is unique to me, I can certainly work around it. I 
know that it's hard to diagnose this kind of problem long-distance via email.

Best,
  John

On Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:19:21 +0100
  Prof Brian Ripley <rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
On 15/04/2013 14:11, John Fox wrote:
Dear Brian,

On Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:56:26 +0100
   Prof Brian Ripley <rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
POSIX-style execute permission isn't a Windows concept, so it was fortuitous 
this ever worked.  One possibility is that Cygwin was involved, and a Cygwin 
emulation got set when tar unpacked the file and converted back to the tar 
representation when Cygwin tar produced the tarball. (The tar in Rtools is a 
fixed version of Cygwin tar, fixed to use Windows file paths.)


Recall that the problem was first detected when I submitted to CRAN
a
new version of the sem package that I built on one of my Windows
systems. I'm guessing that you unpacked that on a Linux system. Perhaps
I misunderstand the point, but if the problem is in unpacking, then
shouldn't I see it when the package is built on R 2.15.2 (not 2.5.2 --
sorry, my typo)?

The puzzle is how you got execute permissions recorded for files on your 
Windows system.  They are not part of the Windows file system: Cygwin uses ACLs 
to emulate them.  Once the ACLs are there, a Cygwin-based tar will put them as 
permissions into the tarball.  But a native Windows tool would not (it might or 
might not capture the ACLs using a tar extension, but those would be ignored by 
most unpacking tools on a Unix-alike).

The issue is not really Windows: if you use a FAT file system on a Unix-alike 
you have the same problem -- this is why SMB mounts at least did not work on OS 
X for building R (and much else), and you need to be careful transferring 
directories via USB sticks (which are usually FAT-formatted).  That route 
usually makes the opposite compromise: to assume everything is executable.

What are those screen shots of?

7zip, which I use on Windows to manage file archives.

Ah, so that's a listing of the .tar.gz, a graphical form of tar -tvf.

R 2.5.2 was a very long time ago.  A recent change is

Indeed. Again, that is my unfortunate typo -- I used 2.15.2. I wanted to 
confirm that I can build packages with the correct permissions on my Windows 
systems using an older (but recent) version of R.


       • R CMD build by default uses the internal method of tar() to
         prepare the tarball.  This is more likely to produce a tarball
         compatible with R CMD INSTALL and R CMD check: an external tar
         program, including options, can be specified _via_ the
         environment variable R_BUILD_TAR.


I saw that but didn't understand its import. That makes sense of a difference 
between R 2.15.2 and 3.0.0, though I'm not sure why this change would introduce 
a problem with the permissions.

Can you try using an external tar?  (Using the internal tar on Windows was 
first trialled in 2.15.3.)


Yes, when I "set R_BUILD_TAR=tar" on my Windows 8 system, the tarball for the 
package is built with the correct permissions under R 3.0.0. The tar should be found in 
the Rtools\bin directory, which is first on my path. I don't have Cygwin installed on 
this machine independently of Rtools.

What's curious to me is that I'm seeing the problem on two different Windows 
system but, AFAIK, no one else has experienced a similar problem.

Very few Windows users will ever get a file that appears to 'tar' to have 
execute permissions.  For example, svn checkouts on Windows lose execute 
permissions, something which has caught me for time to time over the years.

Thanks for your help,
   John


On 14/04/2013 22:17, John Fox wrote:
Dear list members,

I'm experiencing a file permissions problem with a package built under
Windows with R 3.0.0. I've encountered the problem on two Windows computers,
one running Windows 7 and the other Windows 8, and both when I build the
package under RStudio or directly in a Windows console via "R CMD build".

In particular, the cleanup file for the package, which as I understand it
should have permissions set at rwx-r-r, instead has permissions rw-rw-rw.
I've attached two .png screen shots showing how the permissions are set when
the package is built under R 2.5.2 and R 3.0.0.

I think that my two Windows systems are reasonably vanilla. Here are the
system and session info from R 3.0.0 run from a Windows console:

Sys.info()
                        sysname                      release
                      "Windows"                      "7 x64"
                        version                     nodename
"build 7601, Service Pack 1"              "JOHN-DELL-XPS"
                        machine                        login
                          "x86"                       "User"
                           user               effective_user
                         "User"                       "User"

sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.0 (2013-04-03)
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

I have the latest Rtools30 installed and on my path:

Sys.which("tar.exe")
                      tar.exe
"c:\\Rtools\\bin\\tar.exe"

Is this a general problem or is it possible that there's something about my
Windows configurations that's causing it?

Any information would be appreciated.

John

-----------------------------------------------
John Fox
Senator McMaster Professor of Social Statistics
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada




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--
Brian D. Ripley,                  rip...@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


--
Brian D. Ripley,                  rip...@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

______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel


--
Brian D. Ripley,                  rip...@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

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