[Rd] R CMD check --force-biarch

[Russell Almond]

I'm having problems getting R CMD check to work correctly on Windows 7 (64
bit) in a package that uses C code.  What I want to do is to be able to pass
the equivalent of the "--force-biarch" option to check, but this is only
supported for INSTALL.

Background:
I'm writing a package (RNetica) which forms a link between R and a
third-party library (Netica.dll).  The vendor supplies this library in both
a 32 bit and a 64 bit version.
Under Linux, I use configure to link against the 32 or 64 bit version of
libnetica.a as appropriate.
Under Windows, I use configure.win to copy the 32 and 64 bit versions to
"$R_PACKAGE_DIR/libs/i386"  and "$R_PACKAGE_DIR/libs/x64" respectively.

Installation:
This mostly works.  If I run R CMD INSTALL RNetica, R detects the
configure.win and only builds the 64 bit version of RNetica.  [I'm not
entirely clear on why R doesn't at least try to build both architectures.
Wouldn't the default assumption be that the author wrote the configure.win
file to handle both cases?]  But if I use R CMD INSTALL RNetica
--force-biarch, it correctly builds and installs both the 32 and 64 bit
versions.  I can verify that I can load my library and call a few functions
that exercise the DLL.

Checking:
 When I run R CMD check RNetica, I get the following problem in my
00install.out log:
> Warning: this package has a non-empty 'configure.win' file,
> so building only the main architecture
It then fails with the message:
> Error:  .onLoad failed in loadNamespace() for 'RNetica', details:
>   Call:  library.dynam("RNetica",pkgname, libname)
>   Error:  DLL 'RNetica' not found:  maybe not installed for this
architecture?
Sure enough, if I check the directory RNetica.Rcheck/RNetica/libs/x64
It has Netica.dll, RNetica.dll, and symbols.rds
If I check the directory RNetica.Rcheck/RNetica/libs/i386
It only has Netica.dll (copied there by the configure.win).

If I run R CMD check RNetica --no-multiarch, this test runs correctly (only
a few warnings about missing Rd files).
If I run R CMD check RNetica --extra-arch, this fails at the same point.

What I think I need to do is somehow pass --force-biarch to the installation
phase of the check script, but --force-biarch is not a legal argument to R
CMD check, and I'm not sure how to quote it.

Thanks in advance for any help.



Russell Almond
ralmond at fsu.edu
almond at acm.org
http://ralmond.net/