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-2.3.0, I used in /TEMP/R (any other directory will do, except the
sources)

sh /R/R-2.3.0/configure --build=i386-pc-mingw32 --with-readline=no --with-x=no

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.

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

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.

Get the Tcl/Tk sources (I used 8.4.5 when testing this).
You need VC++6 and a Windows command-line window.

Run "\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin\VCVARS32.BAT"

cd tcl8.4.x\win
nmake -nologo -f makefile.vc release winhelp
nmake -f makefile.vc install
cd ..\..\tk8.4.x\win
nmake -nologo -f makefile.vc TCLDIR=..\..\tcl8.4.x release winhelp
nmake -f makefile.vc install

Now copy /Program Files/Tcl to say /R/Tcl and (in any reasonable shell)
cd /R/Tcl
rm bin/tclpip84.dll bin/tclsh84.exe bin/wish.exe
rm -rf lib/*.lib lib/tk8.4/demos lib/tk8.4/images
cp .../tcl8.4.x/license.terms .

BDR 2004-01-09

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 name 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 $*

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 revert to the rule used
in 2.2.1 and 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.

BDR 2006-02-15