[Rd] how to include a windows dll in a package

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 15 Aug 2006, Gabor Csardi wrote:

> Dear R Developers,
> 
> what is the correct way to include a dll in a source package, that
> is expected to be installed in the libs directory?

You could put it in inst/libs.   But we discourage that.
(And if you do do this, watch out for licence conditions.)

> Or in general is there a better way than supplying the dll to use a
> third-party library (libxml2) in a package which should build on windows as
> well? 

As I understand it, several package maintainers have set up arrangements 
with Uwe Ligges to do this, based on DLLs they have supplied him.  
Package XML being an example, so I suspect Uwe already knows all about 
libxml2.  You could actually avoid this by depending on XML and arranging 
to have XML/libs in the PATH at load time.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595