[Rd] Rtools questions

Duncan Murdoch murdoch.duncan at gmail.com
Wed Apr 6 13:54:23 CEST 2011


On 11-04-05 7:51 PM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
 > On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 3:44 PM, Duncan 
Murdoch<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>  wrote:
 >> On 11-04-05 6:22 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:
 >>>
 >>> Hello:
 >>>
 >>>
 >>>         1.  How can I tell when the development version of Rtools has
 >>> changed?
 >>
 >> I don't make announcements of the changes, you just need to check 
the web
 >> site.  There are online tools that can do this for you 
automatically, but I
 >> don't know which one to recommend.  Google suggests lots of them.
 >
 > I also asked myself this before and I must admit it took me a while to
 > interpret the contents of the webpage.  There are multiple sections,
 > e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2', 'Changes since R 2.11.1', 'Changes
 > since R 2.11.0', and so on.  Then within each section there are some
 > dates mentioned.  Given my current R version (say R 2.13.0 beta) and
 > Rtools (Rtools213.exe), it not fully clear to me which section to look
 > at, e.g. 'Changes since R 2.12.2'?

Well, that depends on when you downloaded it.  I use the R version 
releases as bookmarks.  If you last downloaded Rtools after the release 
of R 2.12.2, then you only need to look at the last section.

The problem with collecting changes into those that apply to each Rtools 
version is just that the change lists would be longer:  Rtools212 will 
get changes through several R releases.  When there are compiler 
changes, RtoolsXYZ generally comes out during the previous R version, 
because the compiler may only work with the R-devel version.  For 
instance, Rtools212 was introduced between R 2.11.0 and 2.11.1 and was 
updated a number of times up to quite recently.  (It is now frozen, so 
if you download it now and are working with the R versions it supports 
you never need to worry about updates to it.)

However, if you want to reformat the page, go ahead, and send me the new 
version.  It's a hand edited HTML page so I'd be happy to incorporate 
changes that make it more readable, as long as it's still easy to edit 
by hand.

Gabor asked how to know which version was downloaded.  If you have the 
installer file you can tell:  right click on it, choose Properties, look 
at the Version tab.  If you didn't keep the installer, I don't know a 
way to find out, but it might be recorded in the unins000.dat file that 
the uninstaller uses.  Of course, without downloading the new one you 
can't find out its version:  so back to my original suggestion to 
monitor changes to the web page.  I'll see if there's a way to 
automatically include the revision number in the filename.

Duncan Murdoch





  It might be more clear if there
 > instead the sections would be 'Changes in Rtools213', 'Changes in
 > Rtools212' and so on, and within each maybe list updates by
 > dates/version.  More like a NEWS file.  Then it would be easier to see
 > if there is an updated available or not.  Even a NEWS file only
 > available as part of the installation will help decide whether the
 > version you have installed differ from the one available online.
 > Something like the following:
 >
 > == Changes in Rtools213 ==
 >
 > [...]
 >
 >
 > == Changes in Rtools212 ==
 >
 > 2011-03-25:
 > - Rtools 2.12 has been frozen.
 > - We have updated all of the tools to current Cygwin versions as of
 > March 25, 2011. We added the "du" utility from Cygwin. We have dropped
 > Vanilla Perl. The libjpeg version has been updated to 8c, and libpng
 > has been updated to 1.5.1.
 >
 > 2010-10-18: [v2.12.0.1892]<== Is this an Rtools version?!?
 > - Prior to October 18, 2010, builds of Rtools212.exe did not correctly
 > install the "extras" required to build R. Version 2.12.0.1892 or later
 > should fix this.
 > - We have now updated all of the tools to current Cygwin versions, and
 > have updated the compilers, and included the 64 bit compilers into
 > Rtools. See Prof. Ripley's page for the details.
 > - Perl is rarely needed in R since R 2.12.0, so it is by default not 
installed.
 >
 > 2010-??-??:
 > - The 32 bit version of R-devel (to become R 2.12.0 in fall, 2010)
 > will be built with gcc 4.5.x, so Rtools212 contains a completely new
 > MinGW toolchain based on gcc 4.5.0.
 >
 > == Changes in Rtools211 ==
 >
 > [...]
 >
 >
 > Just a suggestion ...and thanks for providing Rtools!
 >
 > /Henrik
 >
 >>
 >>
 >>   For the past few years, I've installed the development version
 >>>
 >>> of R tools with each new release of R.  I encountered problems with 
this
 >>> a few days ago, so I rolled back to Rtools212.exe.  Unfortunately, I
 >>> seem to have more problems with that version.  My latest install was
 >>> under Windows 7 Home Edition.  My previous problems were on Vista, 
but I
 >>> also have access to Fedora 13 Linux.
 >>
 >> I know that Windows 7 64 bit has problems with Rtools.  Brian Ripley 
has had
 >> some luck using the tools (the bin directory) and Cygwin DLLs from last
 >> summer, along with the current compilers.  I'm reluctant to back out 
the new
 >> versions, because I use Cygwin for other things (including OpenSSH) and
 >> don't want to get locked out of updates.
 >>
 >> I haven't heard of problems with other Windows 7 versions, but I haven't
 >> tried them.
 >>
 >>>
 >>>
 >>>         2.  "R CMD check" ends with the following:
 >>>
 >>>
 >>> * checking examples ... OK
 >>> * checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
 >>> LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
 >>> This typically indicates Rd problems.
 >>> * checking PDF version of manual without hyperrefs or index ... ERROR
 >>> Re-running with no redirection of stdout/stderr.
 >>> Hmm ... looks like a package
 >>> Error in texi2dvi("Rd2.tex", pdf = (out_ext == "pdf"), quiet = 
FALSE,  :
 >>>     unable to run 'pdflatex' on 'Rd2.tex'
 >>> Error in running tools::texi2dvi
 >>> You may want to clean up by 'rm -rf
 >>> C:/Users/sgraves/AppData/Local/Temp/Rtmpr6z3
 >>> r6/Rd2pdf55b96c9a'
 >>>
 >>>
 >>>         This is using Rtools213, downloaded April 4 from
 >>> "www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools" with R installed as follows:
 >>>
 >>>
 >>>> sessionInfo()
 >>>
 >>> R version 2.12.2 (2011-02-25)
 >>> Platform: x86_64-pc-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
 >>>
 >>> locale:
 >>> [1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
 >>> [2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
 >>> [3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
 >>> [4] LC_NUMERIC=C
 >>> [5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
 >>>
 >>> attached base packages:
 >>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
 >>
 >>
 >> Do you have pdflatex?  It's not part of Rtools, it's part of LaTeX, as
 >> described in Rtools.txt.
 >>
 >> Duncan Murdoch
 >>
 >> ______________________________________________
 >> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
 >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
 >>



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