[Rd] Future support for cross-building for Windows

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Cross-building is one of those things that complicates the Windows R build 
process considerably and probably benefits a handful of people.

It has been pointed out that now we have build services such as Uwe's 
win-builder and RForge, there are easy ways to get a (checked) Windows 
binary of a finished R package, and it is nowadays more common to have 
things like a Windows Terminal Server to provide remote desktop access 
to a Windows mahine, or virtual machines running Windows as a guest 
OS.

If the need is only to cross-build packages, it would probably be 
easier to do so within the Unix package install system, effectively as 
another sub-architecture.

So this posting is an opportunity for users to make a _case_ 
(including offering resources) for continued support for 
cross-building either of R itself or of packages.  Either on this list 
or to R-Windows at r-project.org (which goes only to the Windows' 
developers).

(Cross-building is currently broken in the development version of R.)

-- 
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