Building from a source-code library under Windows ================================================= First collect the tools that you need. EITHER The cygwin-B20.x set of tools available from http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin and several mirrors, the Fortran additions ecgs-1.1-f77.tar.gz from that page or directly from http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/ and the Fortran library libg2c.mingw32.a.bz2 from CRAN/bin/windows/windows-NT/base/etc. You can also use the egcs-1.1.2 compilers upgrade from Mumit Khan's site. Do remember to set MAKE_MODE to UNIX. OR The mingw32 port of egcs-1.1 (or 1.1.2) from ftp://ftp.xraylith.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/mingw32, the ld.exe and cygwin1.dll from the B20 set in your path ahead of the mingw32 binaries (if you don't want to download all the B20 distribution, you can find the two files in CRAN/bin/windows/windows-NT/base/etc/ld.cygwin.zip). Suitable versions of rm, sed, mkdir, echo, cp and cat, for example (Win 9x) from the djtools set at CRAN/bin/windows/windows-NT/base/etc or (Win 9x or NT) a cygwin set. perl5, available via http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ports. groff, available at http://www.itribe.net/virtunix/groff-1.10nt.zip. All of these need to be installed and in your path, and the appropriate environment variables set. Then cd RHOME\src\gnuwin32 and run make libR.a which may take several minutes. (We have seen times from 30 secs to 20 minutes depending on processor speed, RAM, disk speed and mingw32 / cygwin. Using a network file system is likely to take longer.) This only needs to be done once. For each package you want to install, unpack it to a directory, say mypkg, in RHOME\src\library, cd RHOME\src\gnuwin32 make pkg-mypkg The makefiles can be customized: in particular the name of the DLL can be set (see the line integrate-DLLNM=adapt) and the compile flags can be set (see the examples in MakeDll). Using zipped help files ======================= You will need zip installed, of course. Just run make ziponly-mypkg after building mypkg. Target `ziphelp-mypkg' will make the zip files but not remove the separate files: this can be used for testing. Checking packages ================= The equivalent of `R CMD check mypkg' on Unix is make pkgcheck-mypkg This runs all the examples in the help files. Using Visual C++ ================ You may if you prefer use Visual C++ to make the DLLs. First build the import library R.lib by lib /def:R.exp Then you can compile the objects and build the DLL by cl /MT /Ox /D "WIN32" /c *.c link /dll /out:mypkg.dll *.obj R.lib (at least under VC++ 4.2). If the C sources use R header files you will need to arrange for these to be searched, perhaps by /I ../../../include