From drf28 at cornell.edu  Fri May 18 17:11:20 2012
From: drf28 at cornell.edu (Daniel Fuka)
Date: Fri, 18 May 2012 11:11:20 -0400
Subject: [Rd] Distributing Executables.
Message-ID: <CAB9w6XzTeMZdVmEis57YNzMnmqV2-Re-h5F+cRsuCJ5esBuvLw@mail.gmail.com>

Sorry for this intrusion, but I am confused by two statements that
appear to conflict at some level in Writing R Extensions, and wanted
to make sure I understand the answer to:
Can we distribute a portable executable compiled from source by CRAN in CRAN?

The following section of Writing R Extensions appears to not be
addressing this issue, as in this case we are discussing portable CRAN
compiled binaries, and not binaries that are submitted to CRAN:
"A source package if possible should not contain binary executable
files: they are not portable, and a security risk if they are of the
appropriate architecture. R CMD check will warn about them unless they
are listed (one filepath per line) in a file BinaryFiles at the top
level of the package. Note that CRAN will no longer accept submissions
containing binary files even if they are listed."

The following section seems to indicate special cases in which
packages can create binary files:
"In very special cases packages may create binary files other than the
shared objects/DLLs in the src directory. Such files will not be
installed in multi-arch setting since R CMD INSTALL --libs-only is
used to merge multiple architectures and it only copies shared
objects/DLLs. If a package wants to install other binaries (for
example executable programs), it should to provide an R script
src/install.libs.R which will be run as part of the installation in
the src build directory instead of copying the shared objects/DLLs."

Once again, sorry for my confusion on this point. I just have what I
might consider a special case where it would be very handy to
distribute a cran compiled executable.

Thanks!
Daniel Fuka



[Rd] Distributing Executables.
Daniel Fuka