From Cameron.Bracken at colorado.edu  Thu Nov 12 02:03:42 2009
From: Cameron.Bracken at colorado.edu (Cameron Bracken)
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:03:42 -0700
Subject: [Rd] Building package under windows which links against a
	cygwin library
In-Reply-To: <4AFB538D.4010902@stats.uwo.ca>
References: <28152c800911111341j782f1a58q79d2dea081fafcaa@mail.gmail.com> 
	<4AFB4A98.70905@stats.uwo.ca>
	<28152c800911111549w33639c30w9d0d9e73a60aa54a@mail.gmail.com> 
	<4AFB538D.4010902@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <28152c800911111703h747a9f7r22c3fc3ffb6f587c@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> On 11/11/2009 6:49 PM, Cameron Bracken wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 11/11/2009 4:41 PM, Cameron Bracken wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I am developing a package
>>>> (http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/swfdevice/) which links against
>>>> the ming C library. The package builds fine under Mac OS X and Linux.
>>>> I am really out of my element on windows, but I know there is a cygwin
>>>> package for libming.
>>>>
>>>> My question is, does anyone have advice/examples on linking R packages
>>>> against cygwin libraries? ?Is this even possible? ?How would I go
>>>> about writing a configure.win script to do this?
>>>
>>> I suspect it's not going to work. ?Linking to any Cygwin library will
>>> pull in the rest, and I would guess that will conflict with something else
>>> in R, which does not use Cygwin.
>>>
>>
>> I figured that would be the case.
>>
>>> What you could do is include a copy of the source to the ming library,
>>> and get the regular R compilers to compile it. ?I just tried, and it
>>> compiled without errors (though there were a few warnings). ?Then you can
>>> write your R interface to it, and everything may just work.
>>
>> Hey, that is great! I thought about doing this but decided arbitrarily
>> that it would be too hard. ?Do I just plop a copy of the ming source
>> in the src/ directory of my package (then adjust Makevars
>> accordingly)? ?Did you run the whole ming configure script as well?
>
> I just ran make. ?I don't think there is any configure script.
>
> I'd probably put their stuff in a subdir of src, just to keep it cleanly
> separated from yours. ?This also gives you the option of *not* compiling it
> on systems like Linux and MacOS that already have it. ?Then make up a
> Makevars.win file that builds it as a static or dynamic lib on Windows and
> links to it, and a Makevars file that just links to it on other platforms.
> ?(You might want to do a static compile on the other systems just so you're
> protected against version changes.)
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>

Thanks for the feedback, I agree that would be the easiest and
preferable way.  But which version of ming are you using that only has
a makefile? The version I need (0.4.0 beta5) has a fairly involved
configure script.  I would have to pick out the components I need for
my package and create a custom makefile for it to be easily usable
(which I may end up doing, thank goodness for open source).

-Cameron



[Rd] Building package under windows which links against a cygwin library
Cameron Bracken