Windows support (ongoing topic)

[jeroen]

As discussed with @s-u we want to test if the new binary format works on Windows.

Setup

I have set up a special CRAN proxy for this experiment that looks like a binary repo in the path format:

https://win.cran.dev/bin/windows/gcc-x86_64/contrib/4.6/PACKAGES

It simply redirects to https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/4.6/PACKAGES but it allows us to test.

Now in our ~/.Renviron file we set:

R_PLATFORM_PKGTYPE=windows.binary.gcc-x86_64

This will make R look at the this repo:

contrib.url('https://win.cran.dev', 'binary')
# "https://win.cran.dev/bin/windows/gcc-x86_64/contrib/4.6"

Note that this repo still contains zip files (of course) as can be seen by the Filename entries in PACKAGES

Status

What does work:

• R seems to find the binaries at the expected place

Bugs:

• R seems to skip over installing the binaries. Possibly because it fails some compatibility check?
• R also does not fall back on building from source when the binary is not acceptable.

[jeroen]

I think the required change is pretty small, this seems to work: r-devel/r-svn@5046400

Note that we need to move the file utils/R/unix/mac.install.R into utils/R/.

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