[Rd] building windows packages under wine/linux and cross-compiling.

[Sean Davis]

Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 8/2/2006 6:05 PM, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
> 
>>Uwe Ligges wrote:
>><snipped>
>>
>>>I cannot imagine: Why should one want to perform difficult cross 
>>>compiling if you have Windows available?
>>>And why should I run R under wine? If I like Windows, I use Windows, if 
>>>I have like Linux, there is no reason to run R under wine.
>>
>>*You* cannot imagine.
>>
>>I am an almost exlusively linux person. An acquitance, also a
>>mainly linux person, for teaching purpose, asked for windows binary
>>of something I (co-)wrote, to be installed on to the teaching machines.
>>Installing too many development tools on teaching machines is not
>>an option; so the other option, than cross-compiling, is to
>>*borrow* a windows machine *set up for development purposes*.
>>(which I did, at the start).
>>
>>I cannot, and would not, keep on repeatedly borrowing other
>>people's windows development machines, which they have possibly
>>spent some time in setting up; besides, they may not have all
>>the tools, and/or willing to put things like Mingw or ActiveState
>>Perl on their machines. I did have to install both, plus the
>>latest version of R - in my first native try, and immediately
>>de-installing them from the borrowed machine as soon as I finished.
>>
>>You are not involved in any teaching roles, I reckon? And you haven't
>>written any packages that you would like others to use, on a
>>different platform from your own?
>>
>>Since I am cross-compiling, it goes that I would like to test
>>the result of cross-compiling right-away under wine, without
>>switching machine or rebooting (in case of dual boot). In fact I
>>found and fix a bug in my code, which *only* shows up under
>>wine's implementation of msvcrt, not on win2k's or glibc's - wine's 
>>msvcrt behavior is valid ANSI C, but different from MS win2k
>>or linux glibc's. (and nobody can say for sure win2k's msvcrt is
>>exactly the same as NT, XP, etc's).
> 
> 
> What I'd recommend you do is get an old laptop with Windows installed on 
> it, and install the development tools there.  There are probably several 
> lying around peoples' offices in your department.  If you found bugs in 
> your code because of differences between wine and Windows, you're also 
> bound to find bugs in wine, and waste a lot of time trying to see what's 
> wrong with your code when really there's nothing at all wrong with it.
> 
> You'll also soon find people complaining that your package doesn't 
> contain compiled HTML help, because there's no Linux tool to build that.
> 
> Windows machines are cheap.  You don't need a new one to build a package 
> or to run R.  I can't imagine there is any change to the build procedure 
> that would cost less in our time than the cost to you of getting an old 
> Windows box.

Or dual-boot your existing linux machine...?

Sean