The R Project SVN R

Notes for Windows Maintainers
=============================

1) fixed/h/config.h can be made automatically.  Some of this is
achieved by overrides in the configure script.

You will need a copy of sh.exe in /bin.  Then with the R sources in
/R/R-2.6.0, I used in /TEMP/R (any other directory will do, except the
sources)

sh /R/R-2.6.0/configure --build=i386-pc-mingw32 --with-readline=no --with-x=no --without-iconv

This ran fairly slowly, currently producing a src/include/config.h
that differs only in that

 - it does not find the declarations of siglongjmp/sigsetjmp (in
   psignal.h)

 - SUPPORT_UTF8 is defined, but that is not true on Windows.

 - HAVE_VASPRINTF is true thanks to the trio library.

 - In mingw-runtime >= 3.10 it finds gettimeofday, but that is
   less accurate than the GetSystemTime used already.

Also, watch out for versions of the header files.  For example,
<strings.h> was in mingw-runtime-1.2 and later, but not in the
Mingw-1.1 bundle.  These days we tend to insist on a current MinGW.

BDR 2002-04-15, 2003-02-10, 2004-06-28, 2005-11-25, 2006-07-06


2) The Makefiles for building a distribution have been reorganized.  Now
all of the decisions about what files go into the distributables are made
in installer/Makefile; the decisions about which component of the setup
program each file goes into are made in installer/JRins.pl.

DJM 2003-02-25


3) Making Tcl/Tk.

See the directory R-Tcl-win in the R-packages SVN repository.


4) Linking to DLLs.

Mingw's ld.exe takes the internal name of the DLL as the object to
link to, and hence for DLLs which are to be linked to (rather than
loaded), the internal names need to be dllname.dll.  This was not being
done by the %.dll rule used in 2.2.1, which builds via a .def file
with first line

LIBRARY $*

[The example in ld.info is

LIBRARY "xyz.dll"

whereas that in the MSDN documentation
(http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d91k01sh.aspx) is

LIBRARY BTREE

so MinGW is inconsistent with MSDN here.]

It would seem that this should just be replaced by $*.dll, but there
is another problem: ld.exe rejects .def files whose LIBRARY name
contains more than one dot, and so this is unable to cope with
packages with a dot in their name.  (We already document that two or
more dots are not allowed.)  So we have had to treat separately the
DLLs which are designed to be linked to.  These are

R.dll : is special-cased, and as it wants to export entry points from
static libraries and exports variables, nothing else we tried worked.

Rblas.dll : has a .def file, and the name was changed to Rblas.dll
there.

Rlapack.dll : is simple, so gcc -shared with no .def file works.

Rproxy.dll : is special-cased.  (Linked against by rcom package.)

The other DLLs which were in R_HOME/bin, Rbitmap.dll and Rchtml.dll,
have been moved to R_HOME/modules.  They are now made directly with
gcc -shared.  Rchtml.dll needs an import library as you cannot link
directly to a .ocx.

However, whereas MSDN says there must be a LIBRARY statement, it seems
not to be required for ld.exe.  So the %.dll rule in MkRules as from
2.3.0 does not have a LIBRARY statement, which circumvents the 'at
most one dot' rule.

BDR 2006-02-15, 2006-02-24


5) Moving to gcc 4.x

It looks like just two things are needed:

- change to BUILD=GCC4 in MkRules.

- in fixed/h/config.h, comment out
#define HAVE_F77_EXTRA_UNDERSCORE 1
and change to one underscore in
#define F77_FUNC_(name,NAME) name ## __


BDR 2007-04-06