From ggrothendieck at gmail.com  Sat Apr 20 20:39:28 2013
From: ggrothendieck at gmail.com (Gabor Grothendieck)
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:39:28 -0400
Subject: [Rd] R 3.0, Rtools3.0,l Windows7 64-bit, and permission agony
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On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13-04-20 2:02 PM, Kevin Coombes wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 4/20/2013 12:54 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>>
>>> On 13-04-20 12:30 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Duncan Murdoch
>>>> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 13-04-20 11:09 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:45 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com>
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Just curious:  how often do you use the Windows find command?
>>>>>>>>> We have
>>>>>>>>> put
>>>>>>>>> instructions in place for people to run the install process with a
>>>>>>>>> renamed
>>>>>>>>> Rtools find command (which I think is the only conflict). The
>>>>>>>>> issue is
>>>>>>>>> that
>>>>>>>>> more users who want to use the command line commands are
>>>>>>>>> familiar with
>>>>>>>>> the
>>>>>>>>> Unix variant (which came first, by the way) than the Windows
>>>>>>>>> one, so
>>>>>>>>> renaming the Rtools one would cause trouble for more people.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Its not just find - its also sort. And really R has no business
>>>>>>>> clobbering built in Windows commands. This is just wrong and really
>>>>>>>> causes anyone who does any significant amount of Windows batch
>>>>>>>> programming (or uses batch programs of any complexity) endless
>>>>>>>> problems.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Which is presumably why Rtools doesn't modify the path by default.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Better solutions (e.g. Rstudio and devtools) temporarily set the path
>>>>>>> on when you're calling R CMD *.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I am well aware of the various kludges to address this including my
>>>>>> own batchfiles ( http://batchfiles.googlecode.com ) which handles this
>>>>>> by temporarily changing the path as well; however, the real problem is
>>>>>> that Rtools does not play nice with Windows and that needs to be
>>>>>> addressed directly.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> It has been.  You ignored it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If some change to address this has been made that would be great but
>>>> there is no mention of it on the Rtools page in the change history
>>>> section (the only documented change relates to the png/tiff/jpeg
>>>> libraries), there was no announcement that I saw and Rtools\bin still
>>>> contains find and sort so what specifically is the change?
>>>
>>>
>>> It's not a change to Rtools, it's a change is to the build system in
>>> R:  it allows you to rename sort or find in your own copy of Rtools,
>>> and R will use whatever you specify.  You were informed of this when I
>>> did it in 2007, and I've mentioned it when the topic comes up here,
>>> most recently in the message quoted above.  That's a long time ago, so
>>> I don't remember if you tried it then, but I've never heard a
>>> complaint from anyone else that it doesn't work.
>>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>>
>> How do you do that?  (More explicitly, what steps would I have to take
>> to redefine things like find.exe and sort.exe in Rtools so that R would
>> know how to find them and use them? I can't figure that out from the
>> earlier parts of these messages.)
>>
>
> Rename them to whatever you want in the Rtools install, then edit the
> definitions.  I think currently they are in src/gnuwin32/Makefile and
> src/gnuwin32/MkRules (one in each), but I'd suggest you just search files
> named M* for the strings "sort" and "find", in case I've got it wrong, or it
> has changed since the last time I looked.
>
> If you try to build R itself rather than just packages, you may need to do
> more edits, because some of the makefiles for things like the jpeg libraries
> weren't written by us, and may have these commands hard-coded.

Are you suggesting that R itself be rebuild?  Rtools be rebuilt?  Some
clarity on this and the process to do it would be helpful.  I was
really looking for a way to do this with an out of the box R
installation since from a practical viewpoint few are going to want to
build their own software.

--
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com



[Rd] R 3.0, Rtools3.0,l Windows7 64-bit, and permission agony
Gabor Grothendieck