The R Project SVN R

Building from a source-code library under Windows
=================================================

First collect the tools that you need.

We recommend that you use the mingw32 port of gcc-2.95 by Mumit Khan from
ftp://ftp.xraylith.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/mingw32. You will also
need suitable versions of make, sh, rm, sed, awk, mkdir, echo, cp and
cat; we have packaged a set at bin/windows/windows-NT/etc/tools.zip
extracted from the cygwin distribution
(http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin and several mirrors). To avoid
past problems on some versions of Windows95, we use the cygwin ld
contained in that set, which must be before the mingw32 one in your
path. (We have no way of knowing if this is still necessary.)

It is also possible to use earlier mingw32 compilers or cygwin-b20.1
with the --no-cygwin flag, but we suggest you do so only if you have a
working setup from building earlier versions of R. We have also
successfully used the variant of mingw32 that uses the MSVCRT run-time 
system (under gcc-2.95 but not earlier versions), and in the case of the
mclust library found this more successful that the standard version.

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.  Edit MkRules to set target and
the appropriate paths as needed. 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
compiler. Using a network file system is likely to take longer.)  This
only needs to be done once for each R release.


For each package you want to install, unpack it to a directory, say
mypkg, in RHOME\src\library, and run

    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.


Debugging
=========

See the RW-FAQ.


Using Visual C++
================

You may if you prefer use Visual C++ to make the DLLs (unless they use
Fortran source!). First build the import library R.lib by

    lib /def:R.exp /out:Rdll.lib

Then you can compile the objects and build the DLL by

    cl /MT /Ox /D "WIN32"  /c *.c
    link /dll /out:mypkg.dll *.obj Rdll.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

If you build a debug version of the DLL in the development
environment, you can debug the DLL code there just by setting the
executable to be debugged to the full path to the R front-end.