[R] R Package Building Question

[Brett Presnell]

I'll start with my apologies to Martin for sending those last two of
message to the list owner (the last one he forwarded was actually sent
a week or two ago and must have been lost in the ether somehow). This
is basically due to fast copy/paste in emacs without paying much
attention to what I'm doing.  Lack of sleep is my excuse, but I don't
know if that goes very far with the hardworking R developers (does
Brian Ripley ever sleep?).

I would also like to add to the kudos for the R core team (and all the
other contributors as well).  Amazingly good work!  The development of
R changes things in a very significant and positive way for many of us
(and our students too).

Finally, I have a question that about building R Packages.  I've read
through the docs and looked into some of the contributed packages, but
I cannot seem to figure this out.  I've put together a very small
package of datasets and a few simple convenience functions for an
undergraduate class.  There are only 4 or 5 functions in the package
at present, and they are all in one file under the R subdirectory of
the package.  I'm having trouble getting this to work under both
Windows-9x and on the UNIX side because of the following:

1. If this file is named R/sta4504 (with no extension), then when I
build the package (under Solaris), create a zip file and install the
package on a Windows PC, it works fine.  However, under Solaris,
R INSTALL sta4504 hangs and does not complete the installation of the
package.

2. If this file is named R/sta4504.R, then the package installs and
works fine on the Solaris machine, but the same package is not
recognized as even existing by R under Windows.

I notice that most (all?) of the contributed packages leave off the
extension, in spite of the advice to the contrary (at least to my
reading) in Section 1.1.3 of "Writing R Extensions", and they all work
on both platforms.  I don't remember ever seeing this come up on the
list, so what am I missing?

In case it matters, I'm running R 0.99.0 on both platforms (I guess
I'll be upgrading the Solaris side this weekend).  The version of
Win95 is several years old (mid 1996, version 4.00.950a it says).
Solaris is 2.6.

-- 
Brett Presnell
Department of Statistics
University of Florida
(presnell at stat.ufl.edu)
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