[R] Building package on Linux and Windows

[michael watson (IAH-C)]

Hi

OK, final stretch now, thank you to everyone who has helped!

(hopefully) final question - what does R CMD build actually do that
tar/gzip and WinZip do not?

I have successfully used R CMD build to create a .tar.gz version of my
package, which installs well and works under Linux - hurray!  I naively
thought that all I had to do now was create a .zip version (using
something like WinZip) and it would work on Windows too - wrong!

On Windows I get:

Error in file(file, "r") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning messages: 
1: error -1 in extracting from zip file 
2: cannot open file `coXpress/DESCRIPTION' 

I didn't run R CMD build on Windows because I don't have "suitable
versions of Unix tools including make, sh, rm, sed, awk,mkdir, echo, cp
and cat; we have packaged a set at
http://www.murdoch-sutherland.com/Rtools/tools.zip.".  Do I really have
to install all of these on my Windows machine to build a package?  

Asked another way - I have a linux .tar.gz file which works, how do I
make a windows version?

Thanks in advance!

Mick