rpvm for win32 (was: Re: [Rd] Adding Tk extensions to R for windows)

[Na Li]

On 30 Sep 2003, Simon Urbanek told this:

>  On Tuesday, September 30, 2003, at 03:42 PM, Marsland, John wrote:
>  
> > necessary for win32 systems. I got more interested when I started
> > thinking about Rpvm and all the spare win32 boxes sitting around -
> > curently this package only works for unix/linux systems. My guess is that
> > an awful lot more of the R project could be made non-platform-specific if
> > this route is followed.
>
>  FYI: Rpvm itself is fairly platform-independent. I had a quick glance at
>  rpvm  on Win32 quite recently. It compiled fine, the only serious problem I
>  had  was  at link-time due to the fact that PVM itself has no shared library
>  that could  be easily used with MinGW (talking about the official binary
>  version). Rpvm  needed hardly any touchups. Presumably compiling PVM with
>  MinGW should solve  the issue and rpvm should work almost out of the
>  box.

It is unfortunately not that easy.  

It should be possible to link rpvm with the .dll from the official PVM win32
port.  (Lately Mingw gcc is said to be able to link directly with DLLs (pure C
library, that is) produced from VC++ out of the box.  At the very least, it is
possible to make a .dll.a import library.)

However, the official PVM-win32 uses rsh and this "feature" is built in. Two
"supported" rshd for win32 are shareware.

Naturally one wants to use (a free) ssh instead. Now after some hacking on the
PVM source to remove the built-in feature, one can:

1. compile PVM under cygwin, using OpenSSH for cygwin.  However this will
make the rpvm/R dependent upon cygwin.dll which is not desirable.

2. compile PVM under mingw, using OpenSSH for cygwin.  But the resulted pvmd
recognizes only Win32 path names whereas cygwin sshd and bash recognize POSIX
path names.  I have yet figured out a way of dealing this.  Are there "native"
(and free) sshd port for win32?  

(I don't have (easy) access to windoze boxes anymore (lucky me!) so I can't
investigate this further.)

Michael