[Rd] Likely disruption to R-devel builds on Windows

[Prof Brian Ripley]

We are planning to phase in some major changes to the R build process 
on Windows shortly, so expect problems and temporary unavailability of 
binary builds of R and of packages, and if you are building from 
sources, check out the latest version of the R-admin manual (in the 
sources) for the current state.

The planned changes are

- to move the 32-bit builds to MinGW's recent release of gcc 4.5.0 
(but with static linking of the Fortran and C++ runtimes: dynamic 
linking of C++ in packages crashes R).

- to merge the 32-bit and 64-bit builds into a single installer and 
(for at least 98% of CRAN) a single binary for each package.

NB: R-devel is not due for release until ca October and changes such 
as this are done early in the development cycle to allow plenty of 
time for them to be bedded down.  Please do take seriously the 
description as

R version 2.12.0 Under development (unstable) (2010-04-29 r51864)
                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

-- 
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