[R] building a "simple" R package

[Charles Annis, P.E.]

Dear R-ers:

Recognizing that it is better to remain silent and have people think you
stupid than to speak and remove any doubt, I fear that I must speak
nonetheless.

I am having the Devil's own time trying to make a simple R package for my
own use.  Yes, I have perused the FAQs and searched the archives.  Yes, I
have read "Writing R Extensions" and eventually divined what Rcmd means and
that it isn’t accessed from an R session.  I downloaded and installed Perl,
and eventually some Unix tools from
http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/tools.zip, specifically tar.exe,
sh.exe, cygwin1.dll, gzip.exe.  I found "package.skeleton" and was able to
produce the requisite files, and even got "Rcmd build" to progress far
enough to begin packaging things.  Alas, I am stymied.  As can be seen in
the screen-dump below, after declaring that tar was building, it was unable
to proceed.

I am using R1.8.1 on a WinXP Professional DELL 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 2 Gig
RAM.  I put all the files mentioned above, including my source folder (I
only have R routines - no C or FORTRAN) in C:\Program Files\R\rw1081\bin to
avoid any potential PATH problems.

Can any kind reader help me?  I realize this shouldn't be this complicated,
but somehow I have made it thus, and would welcome a helping hand.

Thank you.

Charles Annis, P.E.

##########  Screen Dump    #########################################

C:\Program Files\R\rw1081\bin>Rcmd build myPOD
* checking for file 'myPOD/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
* preparing 'myPOD':
* checking whether 'INDEX' is up-to-date ... OK
* removing junk files
* building 'myPOD_1.0.tar.gz'
tar: Files/R/rw1081/bin/myPOD_1.0.tar: Cannot stat: No such file or
directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
tar: Files/R/rw1081/bin/myPOD_1.0.tar: Not found in archive
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
tar: Files/R/rw1081/bin/myPOD_1.0.tar: Cannot stat: No such file or
directory
tar: myPOD: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
myPOD_1.0.tar: No such file or directory

Charles Annis, P.E.
 
Charles.Annis at StatisticalEngineering.com
phone: 561-352-9699
eFax:  503-217-5849
http://www.StatisticalEngineering.com