Figuring Out How to Install R on Windows (from source).

[grabear]

I've never installed R from source before, so I'm using this issue to keep up with that evolving process.

• In order to install R on Windows you need to first have Rtools installed.
• Rtools installs make, tar, etc.
• When you run the Rtools.exe, make sure to check the box that allows you to install R from source:

[sdhutchins]

From this, one question that arises is: Should we require users to do this manually?

[grabear]

Well Idk how to install Rtools from the command line yet. Do you? @sdhutchins

[sdhutchins]

Just transferring my comment to here...

Just thinking on the Windows implementation...I've not seen anything anywhere yet on compiling Rtools (unless the components are zipped after install and then unzipped in another location).

I also haven't seen anything related to Rtools being required for Microsoft R Open. The main drawback of Microsoft R Open though is less recent releases of versions of packages being available.

[sdhutchins]

I came across this...I've been searching for it ALL day...

https://github.com/rwinlib/rtools35 - They have a workaround for building rtools using InnoSetup. This path is obviously more involved and requires setting up InnoSetup.

I think a question we have to ask here is - for Windows, do we anticipate many people using a server only implementation of windows? If not, I think it's right to just direct users to install RTools manually.

The real beauty of the tool for windows is installing R using the command line and switching between different versions.

[sdhutchins]

Per Microsoft R Open's FAQ:

You will need the Intel MKL developer kit to build from source and include the Intel MKL libraries on Linux & Windows. While the binaries include Intel MKL on Linux & Windows, the Microsoft R Open sources are configured by default to build with standard BLAS and LAPACK libraries. If you have the Intel MKL developer kit, follow these instructions to build with it. The R Installation and Administration Guide also provides instructions on building R with various BLAS libraries including MKL, ATLAS and OpenBLAS.

[zongqi-wang]

To be honest. Requiring the user to have Inno setup to build rtools t build R seems like a huge hassel...

[grabear]

So, I accidentally installed R into a directory that I didn't intend to... But...

• The command highlighted in red will silently install Rtools in a specific directory. The red boxes also highlight that this method will successfully install the "Extras to build R"
• The command highlighted in blue will open up the blue window that shows all of the arguments that you can use with Rtools.exe

[grabear]

So per @sdhutchins comment, here are the different versions of Rtools and the versions of R that use them. https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/

[grabear]

I'm exploring the windows filesystem for renv, so I'm learning to install R from source on Windows at the same time. This assumes you already have Rtools installed.

1. Getting the source files

# Get R tarball
mkdir ~/R
cd ~/R
curl https://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-3/R-3.4.3.tar.gz --output R-3.4.3.tar.gz
tar -xf R-3.4.3.tar.gz  # there will be some symlink errors regarding Recommended packages
# Get Recommended
cd R-3.4.3/src/gnuwin32
make rsync-recommended  # This "fixes" the above issue
# Get external software
cd ~/R/R-3.4.3
mkdir extsoft
cd extsoft
curl https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/goodies/multilib/local323.zip --output local323.zip
unzip local323.zip
cd ../src/gnuwin32
...
# For manual installation do this and then use VIM
cp MkRules.dist MkRules.local 
# use VIM; uncommenting EXT_LIBS and setting it to the appropriate path (~/R/R-3.4.3/extsoft)
# Add the Rtools gcc to your PATH
# Look through the file MkRules.local and make any other changes needed: in particular, this is where a 64-bit build is selected and the locations are set of external software for ICU collation and the cairo-based devices.
...
# For programmatic installation we copy the file and then make changes to specific lines
# It would be easy if all of the changes we need to make are commented out already.
# Then we could simply add lines to the bottom of the file.

[grabear]

The above is an incomplete process. Some more of the stuff in MkRules.local need to be changed.